Directions: In the following passage, some words have been deleted. Each question will present three words (I, II, and III) that can fill the blanks. Choose the option containing the word(s) that correctly fills the blanks to complete the passage.

Four centuries ago, a woman named Else Knutsdatter was executed in Vardø, a small coastal town in Norway. She was accused of having used witchcraft to raise an ocean storm that claimed the lives of 40 men. She wasn’t the only one to fall victim to 17th-century folk who – in the ______ (A) of other explanations – could be convinced that disasters were conjured by malevolent sorcerers. Ninety others were executed for conspiring to produce the same storm.Today, we know that physics and atmospheric pressures produced those storms. So, in the realm of weather, we’ve moved to systemic thinking, where bad things don’t need to be explained with ______ (B) to bad actors. When it comes to descriptions of politics and economics, the progress is not so unequivocal. Do bad things like climate change, conflict and corporate greed happen because powerful politicians and CEOs construct it like that, or do they emerge in the vacuum of human agency, in the fact that nobody’s actually in ______ (C)? This is a question that confronts me in the campaign to protect the physical cash system against the digital takeover by Big Finance and Big Tech.
For more than eight years, I’ve advocated for the protection and promotion of physical notes and coins. I wrote a book called Cloudmoney: Why the War on Cash Endangers Our Freedom (2023). In that book, I point out that the public has swallowed a false just-so story that says we are ______ (D) for a cashless society. All over the world, public and private sector leaders claim that ‘our’ desire for speed, convenience, scale and interconnection drives an inevitable digital transition. This is supposed to bring a ‘frictionless’ world of digital payment-fuelled commerce, done at the click of a button or scan of the iris. The message is: keep up or else face being left ______ (E).