Grant the point first: complete each opening
Late though the hour was, nobody showed any sign of leaving.
Whatever the merits of the plan, the timing was indefensible.Each sentence grants the other side a point and then takes it straight back. The opening of that concession is a fixed frame, and one word of that frame is missing: write that single word in the gap. The all-purpose conjunction you would normally reach for fits none of these frames, and that is exactly the point - the marked opening is what gives the clause after it its weight.
1. ___ as I would like to agree with her, the figures simply do not support the claim.
2. For ___ its surface polish, the report tells us nothing we did not already know.
3. Try ___ he might, he could not get the committee to reconsider.
4. ___ that as it may, the decision has already been taken.
5. ___ said, I would not want to overstate the danger.Show the answers
1. Much
2. all
3. as
4. Be
5. ThatItem 1 opens with an adverb of degree rather than a conjunction; the ordinary concessive conjunction would be perfectly grammatical there, but it flattens the effect the writer is after. In item 2 the frame is a fixed pair of little words standing in front of the noun phrase, and the missing half is the quantifier - nothing else can sit between the preposition and the possessive. Item 3 is frozen whole: a bare verb at the front, a modal stranded at the end, and the missing piece is the same small link that item 1 also depends on; not one part of it can be reordered. Items 4 and 5 are set openers you meet constantly in argument and in reporting - the first preserves an old subjunctive form of the verb of being, and the second uses the demonstrative that points away from the speaker, back at the concession just made, not the one you would use for something close at hand. In all five the concession is placed first on purpose, so that the clause after the comma lands as the real argument.