Question

Choose the appropriate noun form of the underlined verb to fill in the blank:
Shashank complained against me to the principal.
However, the principal did not take the _______ seriously.

a)complain
b)complaint
c)complainance
d)compliance

Answer 1

Hint: The verb ‘complained’ can be converted into a noun form by adding the appropriate suffix.

Complete step-by-step answer:

 The underlined word ‘complained’ is a verb. To convert a verb into a noun, you usually add different suffixes. These suffixes are different for different words and can range from a simple ‘-‘ in a word like ‘honesty’ to more complicated ones such as ‘-tion’ in ‘sophistication’.

Let’s look at our options one by one:

complain - This word is a verb. It is incorrect to place a verb after an article, for example, the principal did not take the complain seriously is grammatically incorrect. So, this option is wrong.
complaint - This word is a grammatically correct noun. This word can fill the blank after an article because it would be correct to put a noun after an article. So, this option is correct.
complainance - This word is grammatically incorrect. It would be incorrect to use this to fill the given blank. So, this option is incorrect.
compliance - This is a grammatically correct word, but it has nothing to do with the verb ‘complained’. The meaning of the word ‘compliance’ is ‘co-operation’. So, it would be incorrect to use this.

There is no way to guess these forms and the only way to correctly guess them is to memorize them.

Note: Use the elimination method to correctly identify the grammatically correct and contextual word.