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Difficulty: EasyEmphatic Stress

In the statement below, the word in CAPITAL LETTERS has the emphatic stress.

The doctor bought a NEW car yesterday.

Which of the following questions is best answered by this statement?

  1. Did the doctor buy an old car yesterday?Answer
  2. B
    Did the nurse buy a new car yesterday?
  3. C
    Did the doctor sell a new car yesterday?
  4. D
    Did the doctor buy a new house yesterday?

Answer

Did the doctor buy an old car yesterday?
The correct option asks whether the doctor bought an old car. Because 'NEW' is emphasized, the sentence serves to contradict the notion that the car was old, while agreeing with all other unaccented details of the statement.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the word receiving emphatic stress in the given statement.
The word receiving emphatic stress is 'NEW'.
Emphatic stress is indicated by the word printed in full capital letters.
2
Determine the contrastive focus created by the emphatic stress.
Placing emphatic stress on 'NEW' highlights the age or condition of the car while keeping all other information in the sentence constant.
Stressing an adjective implies a contradiction to an opposite quality or alternative descriptor (such as 'old' or 'used').
3
Select the question that contradicts only the stressed word.
The question asking if the doctor bought an old car is answered by emphasizing that the car was NEW.
Only this question contrasts the word 'NEW' while leaving the subject ('doctor'), verb ('bought'), object ('car'), and time ('yesterday') unchanged.

Key Concept

Emphatic stress places contrastive emphasis on a specific word in a sentence to contradict or correct an assumption about that precise detail.
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Topics

Emphatic Stress

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