Advanced Idioms — Multiple Choice, Set 1 (C2)

After the painful merger negotiations, the board decided to ___ and avoid revisiting the contentious redundancy terms that had nearly derailed the process.

The newly appointed chief mediator was praised for her ability to ___ whenever talks became heated between the two rival factions.

The theatrical premiere, hyped for months as a landmark event, turned out to be a rather ___, with sparse dialogue and an anticlimactic final scene.

Critics suspected the think-tank economist ___ in his damning report on pension reform, given that his consultancy stood to benefit from the proposed alternative scheme.

The parliamentary bill had all but collapsed when the opposing factions reached a compromise ___, preventing a constitutional crisis.

The new government office complex in the capital had barely been occupied before it was widely criticised as ___, consuming enormous maintenance costs with no tangible public benefit.

Just as the director was about to announce the company's record quarterly profits to the shareholders, the CFO ___ by leaking the figures to the financial press the previous evening.

Determined to manage the celebrity's social media presence independently without agency support, the pop star ___ spectacularly when her off-the-cuff comments sparked an international controversy.

The editorial board and the newspaper's senior management have been ___ for weeks over whether to publish the leaked diplomatic cables without redaction.

When the whistleblower publicly condemned the data practices of the very corporation that had funded his academic research for fifteen years, colleagues felt he was ___.

After a dominant campaign, the veteran marathon runner was ___ in the final stretch by a little-known 23-year-old who surged from fifth place.

The environmental lobby has ___ so frequently about imminent ecological collapse over the past two decades that even sympathetic politicians now pause before committing to emergency legislation.

In his editorial, the literary critic argued that adding a preface explaining every symbolic motif was tantamount to ___, undermining the very ambiguity that made the novel remarkable.

By publicly endorsing the opposition's candidate, the long-serving senator effectively ___, making any reconciliation with her own party all but impossible.

In a grim irony, the data analyst who had designed the surveillance algorithm specifically to identify leakers within the firm was himself caught by its protocols — ___ by the very system he had created.