<p>the once-upbeat party members had to reevaluate their guiding principles after the initial _____ of the movement gave way to a ----------- assessment of the chance for reform.</p>
<p>a. impetus..favorable
b. nihilism...promising
c. ebullience...pessimistic
d.dynaimsim...vigorous
e. despondency..bleak</p>
<p>I don't understand what the sentence means at all, can someone explain</p>
<p>I think that C is the correct answer.</p>
<p>The “once-upbeat” helps for the first bubble, which should have a positive word. </p>
<p>The second bubble has to be the opposite, so there must be a negative word.</p>
<p>I can’t really explain it more simply. Someone else probably can.</p>
<p>the once-upbeat party members had to reevaluate their guiding principles after the initial _____ of the movement gave way to a ----------- assessment of the chance for reform.</p>
<p>the party had to reevaluate their principles after the first <em>__(upbeat event)</em> of the movement led to <em>__(bad consequences/loss of hope for reform)</em>_.</p>
<p>My first impulse was to go for E. But looking at the other responses, maybe I was wrong? I figured that if they were once-upbeat (meaning that they no longer are), then it obviously happened because of a negative event that caused them to reevaluate their optimistic attitude.</p>
<p>Something sounds off…anyone else willing to throw in their 2 cents worth?</p>
<p>EDIT: I think C makes sense now. I kind of overlooked the “initial” part of it</p>
<p>It’s definitely C. You could paraphrase the sentence to make it sound like this:</p>
<p>After the initial ebullience (excitement) of the movement gave way to a pessimistic assessment of the chance for reform, the upbeat party members had to reevaluate their guiding principles.</p>
<p>And btw, I think you already know this but the “party” in the sentence refers to a political party. It was maybe because English is not my first language but I had to have a second look at the sentence to fully grasp the idea.</p>
<p>Akrana has the right approach.</p>
<p>The sentence is looking for a first word that is consistent with “upbeat,” and a second word that is a negative contrast (“gave way” hints that the initial positive prospects changed into something negative).</p>
<p>Even without knowing some of the difficult words in the answer choices, you can easily eliminate A, B, and D because all have positive second words.</p>
<p>At this point, you’d have to guess if you didn’t know the meaning of the first words in the answer choices. If you did know the words, you could quickly eliminate E (despondency being a negative word referring to a state of despair) and pick C (ebullience being a positive word referring to great enthusiasm).</p>
<p>I understand how the answer is C, because of that approach.
However, this was my interpreatation, can someone find the flaws in it?:
I choose answer A:
the “once-upbeat party members” (happy) had to reevaluate their “guiding principles” (political platform) after the initial impetus (start) of the movement gave way to a “favorable assessment of the chance for reform” (reforming will be better).</p>
<p>In other words, I interpreted it that the party members used to like their "guiding principles, but later realized that reforming would be better. </p>
<p>Or am I totally off?
I think the most difficult part was “favorable assesmnet of the chance for reform” what exactly does that mean?</p>