Fill in the blank with the most appropriate word: Ignoring someone in pain is an ______ act.

Difficulty: Easy

Correct Answer: Immoral

Explanation:


Introduction / Context:
This sentence completion question tests both vocabulary and your sense of moral meaning. The action described is ignoring someone who is in pain. The blank calls for an adjective that evaluates this behaviour ethically or morally. You need to choose the word that best describes such an act in terms of right and wrong, not in terms of life span, fertility, or irritation.


Given Data / Assumptions:

  • The action is ignoring someone in pain, which is ethically negative.
  • Immortal means never dying or living forever.
  • Aggravating means causing annoyance or making a problem worse.
  • Immoral means against accepted moral principles; wrong or unethical.
  • Fecund means fertile or highly productive.


Concept / Approach:
The stem clearly describes a behaviour that is morally wrong: failing to show care or concern for someone who is suffering. Among the options, only immoral directly addresses moral wrongness. Immortal is related to life and death, not to ethics. Aggravating describes how something may increase annoyance or severity, but does not evaluate the act itself as right or wrong. Fecund refers to fertility and productivity, which is totally unrelated. Therefore, immoral is the best fit for the blank.


Step-by-Step Solution:
Step 1: Understand the meaning of the sentence: Ignoring someone in pain is being cold or uncaring in the face of suffering.Step 2: Decide that the speaker is judging this act in an ethical sense, calling it wrong or bad.Step 3: Match this idea with the vocabulary options, identifying immoral as meaning not moral, against accepted standards of right behaviour.Step 4: Exclude immortal, which can mean living forever, as it has no moral dimension here.Step 5: Exclude aggravating and fecund because they refer to irritation and fertility, respectively, neither of which fits the context of moral judgment.


Verification / Alternative check:
Consider paraphrasing the sentence with each option. Ignoring someone in pain is an immoral act sounds natural and expresses clear moral condemnation. Using immortal would yield an immortal act, which normally means something that will be remembered forever and is completely off-topic here. Calling the act aggravating would say only that it is annoying, not morally wrong. Describing it as fecund is nonsensical. This simple substitution test confirms immoral as the correct choice.


Why Other Options Are Wrong:
Immortal deals with the duration of life, not with ethics. Aggravating might describe the person who is in pain as feeling annoyed, but it does not describe the moral quality of the bystander behaviour. Fecund usually describes land, animals, or people that are very fertile or productive and has no place in a sentence about ignoring pain. These options fail to capture the moral evaluation present in the sentence.


Common Pitfalls:
Sometimes students misread immortal as immoral because of their similar spelling and may think either one can fit. However, the prefixes im in immoral and im in immortal come from different roots: one negates moral and the other negates mortal. Always slow down and check the middle part of such words (moral vs mortal) to avoid confusing very different meanings.


Final Answer:
The most appropriate word to describe ignoring someone in pain is Immoral, so option C is correct.

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