TOEIC Link Reading — Part 5 Conjunction Versus Preposition Selection: The One Grammar Distinction That Decides a Cluster of Incomplete-Sentence Items

TOEIC Link Reading Part 5 presents single sentences with one blank and four options. Many candidates treat every item as a fresh puzzle and burn twenty or thirty seconds hunting for the answer that "sounds right." That approach is slow and, on one specific item family, unreliable — because the family is engineered so that the wrong answer does sound right to an ear trained on meaning rather than structure. The family is the conjunction-versus-preposition contrast, and it appears often enough across a Part 5 section that recognizing it on sight is one of the highest-leverage pattern skills you can build.

The item looks like this: the blank could plausibly be filled by because or because of, by although or despite, by while or during. The two candidates are near-synonyms in meaning, so meaning cannot break the tie. Only structure can. This guide gives you the three-step test that resolves the entire family mechanically, so you spend your reading time where it actually pays off — the inference-heavy Part 7 double passages. For the broader triage that gets you there, see the guide on time allocation and question triage protocol.

Why meaning cannot break the tie

Consider two sentences:

• The launch was delayed because the supplier missed the deadline.
• The launch was delayed because of the supplier's missed deadline.

Both mean the same thing. If the blank sat between them and both because and because of were offered, no amount of "which sounds better" would separate them — they sound equally fine, because they are equally fine as English. The test is not asking whether you understand the sentence. It is asking whether you can see what grammatical unit follows the blank. This is the core insight: the answer is determined by the words after the blank, not by the meaning of the sentence. Candidates who read for meaning look in the wrong place and guess.

The one rule underneath the whole family

Every word in this family is either a conjunction or a preposition, and the two categories connect different things:

• A conjunction (because, although, while, when, if, since, so that) joins the blank to a full clause — a unit with its own subject and its own conjugated verb.
• A preposition (because of, despite, during, owing to, in spite of, due to) joins the blank to a noun phrase — a noun or gerund with no separate conjugated verb.

So the decision reduces to one question: after the blank, is there a subject-plus-verb clause, or is there just a noun phrase? Clause → conjunction. Noun phrase → preposition. That is the entire rule. Everything below is how to apply it fast and where the traps hide.

The three-step test

Step 1 — Cover the blank and read only what follows it

Do not read the whole sentence for meaning first. Put your eyes immediately after the blank and read forward until the first main verb or the end of the clause. You are looking for one thing: is there a conjugated verb with its own subject in this stretch?

• "...the supplier missed the deadline" → the supplier (subject) + missed (verb) = a clause → you need a conjunction.
• "...the supplier's missed deadline" → a noun phrase, no conjugated verb → you need a preposition.

Step 2 — Sort the four options into the two boxes

Two of the four options are almost always conjunctions and two are prepositions (or the test mixes in an unrelated adverb as a distractor). Sort them:

If Step 1 told you the blank is followed by a clause, cross out both prepositions immediately. You have halved the item without reading for meaning at all.

Step 3 — Break the remaining tie on meaning, only now

Once structure has eliminated two options, the surviving pair usually differs in meaning — for example because (cause) versus although (contrast). Now, and only now, read the whole sentence and pick the logical connector. Meaning is your last step, not your first. This ordering is what makes the family fast: you never weigh meaning across four options, only across the two that structure permits.

The three traps that catch fast readers

Trap 1 — the inserted phrase. The test drops a phrase between the blank and the clause to disguise the structure: "...despite the repeated warnings, the team proceeded." A reader who stops at "the repeated warnings" sees a noun phrase and wrongly locks in a preposition — but the real clause (the team proceeded) is further along, and the sentence actually wants a conjunction if the blank governs that clause. Fix: read to the main verb of the stretch the blank introduces, not just to the first noun.

Trap 2 — the gerund that looks like a verb. "...during reviewing the contract" is wrong, but reviewing can look like a verb to a hurried eye. A gerund is a noun; it takes a preposition, not a conjunction. The tell: a gerund has no subject of its own. If there is no subject, it is a noun phrase — preposition. This overlaps with the broader skill covered in verb tense consistency across passage in text completion, where distinguishing finite verbs from non-finite forms is the recurring decision.

Trap 3 — the meaning-first reflex. Under time pressure the eye jumps to meaning because meaning is where comprehension lives. But on this family meaning is a trap by design, since both survivors mean nearly the same thing. Training yourself to run Step 1 before your eyes register the whole sentence is the single behavioral change that converts this family from a coin flip into a near-certain point.

How this connects to Part 6 text completion

The same conjunction-versus-preposition logic reappears in Part 6, where the blank sits inside a paragraph rather than a standalone sentence. The added dimension in Part 6 is that the correct connector must also fit the flow of the surrounding sentences, not just the local clause structure. The structural test still runs first — clause or noun phrase — and the discourse fit is the tiebreaker, exactly parallel to Step 3 here. For that layer, see incomplete text completion and discourse connective selection under time constraint.

A fifteen-second routine you can drill

1. Spot the family: two options look like near-synonyms (because / because of). That is your signal.
2. Cover the blank; read forward to the first conjugated main verb.
3. Subject + verb present → conjunction; noun or gerund only → preposition. Cross out the losing box.
4. Read the full sentence once; pick the survivor whose meaning fits.

Practice this on ten items in a row until Step 1 fires automatically the moment you see a synonym pair in the options. Once it does, an entire predictable cluster of Part 5 items becomes near-free points — and the time you save funds the careful reading that the harder passages demand.

Summary

The conjunction-versus-preposition family is designed to defeat meaning-first reading, and that is exactly why a structure-first routine dismantles it. Look after the blank, decide clause versus noun phrase, eliminate half the options on structure alone, and resolve the last pair on meaning. Fifteen seconds, high reliability, and a recurring source of points across every Part 5 section you will sit.