Choose the most appropriate option to fill in the blank in the given sentence:
There were no _________ than five thousand people at the lavish wedding! It truly was a vulgar display of wealth in times of rising inflation and drought.
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 1
The correct answer is Option (1) → less
Note: The given answer is as per the official NTA Answer Key. However, more than one answer is possible here: Option (1) "less" and Option (2) "fewer" both make a correct sentence, as explained below.
Option 1: less — Correct (Answer as per NTA). No less than + a number is a fixed phrase used to stress that the number is surprisingly large ("as many as"). It is widely used with numbers of people and things, and it fits the speaker's shock at the size of the wedding.
Example: No less than ten thousand fans waited outside the stadium.
Option 2: fewer — Can also be considered as correct. Fewer is used with nouns that can be counted, and "people" is countable; formal grammar therefore prefers "no fewer than five thousand people". (Fewer is used with countable nouns, less with amounts that cannot be counted.)
Example: No fewer than fifty students applied for the scholarship.
Option 3: lesser — Incorrect. Lesser is an adjective meaning smaller in importance or degree (the lesser evil); it is not followed by "than".
Example: He chose the lesser of the two evils.
Option 4: least — Incorrect. Least is the superlative form (the smallest amount of all); a superlative cannot be followed by "than".
Example: She has the least experience of all the candidates.