Question

He performed _ _ _ _ _ on the Annual day. Choose the correct word to fill in the blank.
A. excellent
B. excellently
C. excel
D. ecellentfully

Answer 1

Hint: Adverb is an expression that describes a verb (she speaks loudly), an adjective (she is very fat), another adverb (the show ended too quickly), or even a whole sentence (Fortunately, I had brought my lunch). They help to express the manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc. They are regarded as one of the parts of speech. They are characterized by their ‘-ly’ endings but some adverbs such as fast look the same as their adjective counterparts.

Complete answer:
1. The word ‘excellent’ refers to something that is extremely good.
2. When forming adverbs from adjectives, it is important to notice their endings. For example, words like quick, cheap or slow do not have a ‘-y’ or a ‘-able’/’-ible’ ending. Thus, their adverbs will be made by adding a ‘-ly’ to their endings thus forming quickly, cheaply and slowly respectively.
3. If the adjectives end in ‘-y’, then the ‘-y’ is replaced by an ‘-i’ and an ‘-ly’ is added in the end. For example, the adjective easy has a ‘-y’ ending. So, we replace its ‘-y’ with an ‘-i’ and then add a ‘-ly’ at the end thus forming the adverb ‘easily’.
4. Similarly, if we look into the adjective ‘excellent’, we can notice that it does not end with a ‘-y’ or an ‘-i’ or any vowel ending. It ends with a consonant.
5. So, if we add a ‘-ly’ in its end then we can get its adverb form- excellently.
6. We can see that out of all the options, only the second option is the correct answer.
7. 'excellent', 'excel' and 'ecellentfully' cannot be used here as either of any word is incorrect or not as per the context. The first option is the adjective itself; the third option is the verb whereas the last one is grammatically incorrect.

Hence the correct answer is option ‘B’.

Note: We have seen that adjectives can be converted into adverbs by changing their endings. But there are some adverbs that sound exactly like their adjective counterparts. For example, the adjective ‘fast’ is also an adverb. Something similar happens with the words ‘early’, ‘hard’, ‘high’, ‘late’, ‘near’, ‘straight’ and ‘wrong’.