Question

Choose the option that best corrects the sentence-
A. Sadly, the king showed a little justice to the pauper.
B. Sadly, the king showed the little justice to the pauper.
C. Sadly, the king showed little justice to the pauper.
D. Sadly, the king showed some justice to the pauper.
E. No change

Answer 1

Hint: ‘A little’ refers to a quantifier that is used with a noun to indicate the amount or the quantity of something.

Complete step-by-step answer:

As given in the hint, we use quantifiers when we need to provide details or information about the amount or number of something.
We generally don’t begin the sentence with an adverb, if we include a quantifier in the sentence.
Example- Unfortunately, I ate a little food. Here, ‘unfortunately’ is an adverb that expresses bad luck or regret, while ‘a little’ is a quantifier that indicates the amount of the noun ‘food’. But we cannot use ‘unfortunately’ and ‘a little’ together, because it won’t have been unfortunate if a little amount of food had been eaten by X.
Hence, we remove the article ‘a’ to change the meaning and the sense of the sentence.
In the given question: We cannot use the adverb ‘sadly’ as it means ‘unfortunately’ and it wouldn’t have been unfortunate if the king had shown a little justice. We need to eliminate the article ‘a’ to indicate that the pauper was unfortunate as he was shown no justice by the king.

Now, let’s examine the given options-
Option a- ‘Sadly, the king showed the little justice to the pauper’ is an inappropriate option, because ‘the’ is a definite article that is used to modify proper nouns or particular nouns. Hence, it is an incorrect option.
Option b- ‘Sadly, the kind showed little justice to the pauper’ is an accurate option, as we have removed the article ‘a’ to change the meaning of the sentence. Hence, it is the correct option.
Option c- ‘Sadly, the king showed some justice to the pauper’ is an inaccurate option, as ‘some’ completely changes the sense and meaning of the sentence. Hence, it is an incorrect option.
The correct answer is Option ‘b’.

Note: Do not get confused between the different options. Carefully read and understand the different options and choose the one that expresses the correct meaning of the above-given sentence.