[Grammar] There is nothing left on the plate, ...?

[armruseng]

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen!

Could anyone, please, help me with the following disjunctive question.

There is nothing left on the plate, ...?
1. is there
2. is it
3. isn't it
4. isn't there

My choice is there was marked as incorrect. The logic I used was this: There is nothing means virtually there isn't anything. So I selected is there as a continuation.
Obviously the creators of the test used a different logic, and I suspect they expected the answer "isn't there". But it doesn't sound very stylistically correct to me, because provided in full the second part would sound isn't there nothing left, which doesn't really make sense for me.

 

[bhaisahab]

1. is there? is correct. Where did you find this?

 

[armruseng]

Thanks, bhaisahab! It's from an English test in a Russian University.

Do you think it's OK to provide a couple of questions here to not litter the forum with new threads? In case you think, here are the questions I also believe I have answered more or less correctly.

------
1) Yesterday we ……… our report from 5 to 7 o'clock.
1. was writing
2. wrote
3. had written
4. were writing (my choice, marked as incorrect)
------
2) I asked my sister to tell me what she … at the museum.
1. will seen
2. had seen (my choice, marked as incorrect)
3. has seen
4. will see
------

 

[emsr2d2]

2 is a poor question. Both "had seen" and "will see" work. (I think you missed a word from the beginning of the sentence though.)

I agree with your answer for question 1. However, "wrote" also works. It's not a great sentence though. I would expect the end to be "between 5 o'clock and 7 o'clock". Even then, both "wrote" and "were writing" are possible.

 

[armruseng]

Thanks, emsr2d2! Your advice completely agrees with my point.

In Q1, though I knew that "wrote" would do just fine, my choice of "were writing" was mostly an attempt to guess what the examiners were expecting me to answer. Especially given that there was another sentence "They were seeing the sights of London while their cousin waited for them at the hotel.", and "were seeing" (as opposed to "saw") was accepted as a correct answer. The two sentences look identical to me. Anyway I failed at my attempt to guess

In Q2 the choice of "had seen" was based on the notion that the sister most likely couldn't have known what she was going to see in the museum prior to going there.

PS Yes, "I" was missing from the second sentence