Question

Choose the option that best fills the blank:
No sooner did he reach the train station _ _ _ _ _ _ the train arrived.
A. than
B. after
C. for
D. then

Answer 1

Hint: A conjunction is a small yet an important element that combines two words, phrases or clauses in a sentence. There are four types of conjunctions used in English grammar. The first type is the ‘coordinating’ conjunction (the acronym ‘FANBOYS’ as shown ‘for’, ‘and’, ‘nor’, ‘but’, ‘or’, ‘yet’ and ‘so’) that joins two or more words/phrases/clauses/sentences of equal syntactic importance. Then the correlative conjunctions like ‘either-or’, ‘neither-nor’, ‘both-and’ come in pairs and join two words/phrases together. Subordinate conjunctions like ‘although’, ‘unless’ and ‘since’ make clauses dependent along with the relation with the independent clause in the sentence. Adverbial conjunction like ‘besides’is adverbs which act like connectors too.

Complete step by step answer:
1. Here we will be checking each option one by one so that we can detect the correct option for the question.
2. The structure “no sooner” is used when we talk about something that happens immediately after something else. From the given sentence, we can infer that ‘he’ (subject) reaches the train station and immediately then the train arrived. These two activities take place almost simultaneously. There is no real-time difference between them. The conjunction pair 'No sooner -- than' denotes simultaneous actions. Thus, Option A is correct.
3. Option B (after), option C (for) and option D (then)need to be ruled out as they are not compatible with this question sentence. Please check that “no sooner …. after”, “no sooner …. for” and “no sooner … then” combinations can’t be appropriate with the rule of conjunctions because all these three options have different meanings which are not related with ‘no sooner’.

Hence the option A is the right answer.

Note:
Sentences are formed by a few grammatical elements that bring out their basic meaning. These elements can be the subject, object, verb and.last but not the least, helping verbs. They form phrases and clauses which are connected by words which are known as conjunctions. In our question sentence, if we look, we can see that the combination of “no sooner” and “than” derives the meaning of the sentence in clear manner by placing themselves in different positions in the sentence.