It was not until the early hours of dawn ______ the search team located the missing hikers.
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. that the emergency rescue operation succeeded
- Step 1: The cleft sentence construction 'It was not until [time expression] that...' requires the conjunction 'that' to introduce the focal clause. This structure emphasizes the specific temporal boundary at which the main event finally took place. Answer: that the emergency rescue operation succeeded. Why not the others: "when the rescue occurred" erroneously substitutes 'when' for the cleft operator 'that' after 'it was not until'; "then the team arrived" produces a comma splice by using an adverbial connector instead of a subordinating cleft conjunction; "which the scouts found" uses a relative pronoun 'which' that cannot syntactically complete the it-cleft frame.
Practise more Subjunctive, Inversion and Cleft Structures.
Free questions with an explanation for every one, and full timed State Certificate of Language Proficiency (KPG) English mock tests.
More Subjunctive, Inversion and Cleft Structures questions
- Hardly ______ the conference hall when the keynote speaker was introduced.
- If the government ______ stricter emissions regulations five years ago, the urban smog levels would not be so severe today.
- The university committee recommended that every faculty member ______ the safety protocol immediately.
- Little ______ about the sudden collapse of the financial institution until the audit was published.
- ______ exhaustively on the clinical trial, the researchers submitted their groundbreaking paper to the medical journal.
- The ancient manuscript is believed ______ by Monophysite scribes during the late sixth century.