Sentence improvement — Choose the precise noun for ‘‘lack’’: revise the economic sentence ‘‘we have no shortcoming to cheap labour in India’’ to the most idiomatic collocation.

Given dataOriginal (faulty): ‘‘Whatever to our other problems, we have no shortcoming to cheap labour in India.’’

Concept/ApproachThe idiomatic collocation is ‘‘no scarcity of cheap labour’’ (i.e., there is plenty available). ‘‘Shortcoming’’ refers to a defect/weakness in character or quality, not to quantitative lack; ‘‘deficit’’ is used with budgets; ‘‘default’’ is unrelated.

Option analysisdefault — Means failure to fulfill an obligation; wrong semantic field.deficit — Typically financial; not the right fit with ‘‘labour’’ availability.scarcity — Correct noun for quantitative insufficiency; used here in the negative: ‘‘no scarcity of …’’No improvement — Keeps non-idiomatic wording.shortfall — Also a quantity term but the fixed phrase is ‘‘no scarcity of’’.

Verification/AlternativePolished sentence: ‘‘Whatever our other problems, we have no scarcity of cheap labour in India.’’

Common pitfallsConfusing ‘‘shortcoming’’ (qualitative defect) with ‘‘scarcity’’ (quantitative lack).

Final Answerscarcity