5 exercises — practise the emphatic intensifier "nothing short of".
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "nothing short of" plus a noun phrase to intensify a positive claim?
"...was nothing short of a miracle" correctly follows the fixed phrase "nothing short of" with a noun phrase. Option B drops the required "of". Option C scrambles the word order. Option D wrongly attaches a finite clause instead of a noun phrase.
2 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "nothing short of" to intensify a negative outcome in an incident report?
"The outage was nothing short of a disaster..." correctly preserves the fixed phrase exactly. Option B wrongly substitutes "from" for "of". Option C wrongly inflects "short" as a comparative. Option D duplicates and scrambles the words.
3 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "nothing short of" with a gerund noun phrase to describe an extreme effort?
"...required nothing short of rewriting the entire test harness" correctly follows "of" with a gerund phrase, which functions as a noun phrase. Option B wrongly uses a to-infinitive. Option C uses a bare verb instead of a gerund. Option D scrambles the fixed word order.
4 / 5
Which sentence correctly distinguishes "nothing short of" (an extreme, near-hyperbolic equivalence) from "almost" (a more measured approximation)?
"...nothing short of instantaneous, not merely almost instantaneous..." correctly contrasts the extreme intensifier with the more modest "almost". Options B, C, and D scramble the two fixed expressions into ungrammatical combinations.
5 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "nothing short of" at the start of a summary clause about a team's turnaround?
"...was nothing short of remarkable" correctly keeps the three fixed words in their standard order before the noun phrase (here an adjective used predicatively as the intensified quality). Options B, C, and D each scramble the internal word order of the fixed phrase.