Select the correct idiom to fill in the blank in the following senten…

The correct answer is Option (1) → at cross purposes

One speaker meant the exams and the other thought he meant the whole course.
Complete sentence: We were talking at cross purposes. I was talking about the exams, and you thought I meant the course as a whole.

Idiom	Meaning	Example
(1) at cross purposes (answer)	to misunderstand each other because each person is talking about something different without realising it	The two officers argued for an hour before they saw they were talking at cross purposes.
(2) to some purpose	with some useful result. The speakers did not achieve anything, they misunderstood each other.	He used his free time to some purpose and learnt to swim.
(3) in the dark	to know nothing about something. The idiom goes with "be" or "keep" (kept in the dark), not with "talking", and the speakers were not ignorant. They were talking about different things.	The staff were kept in the dark about the merger.
(4) out of the loop	to not be informed about what a group knows. "Talking out of the loop" is not an English expression, and nobody here was left uninformed.	I was on leave, so I am out of the loop on the new project.

Note: In the original NTA paper, Option 4 read "through our hat". NTA accepted this option as a correct answer as well. To leave only one correct answer and avoid confusion for students, it has been changed here to "out of the loop".

Advice for the exam: In the real exam, mark the answer that is grammatically or factually correct. If NTA’s provisional answer key marks a different option, challenge it during the answer-key challenge window and give the reason in one or two lines.