BPSC 69th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 144 of 144

Correct — D, Snobbery : Shoes. The relation being tested is trade-or-goods to product: in each of the other three pairs the first word names a craft, a manufacturing place or a class of merchandise, and the second word names what it deals in. Millinery is the trade of designing, making and selling women's hats — the word descends from Milaner, a dealer in fancy wares brought from Milan, which is exactly how it settled on hats and trimmings. A brewery is the plant in which beer or ale is brewed by fermenting malted grain, so its output is an alcoholic drink. Stationery, spelt with an 'e', means writing materials — paper, envelopes, pens — and comes from stationer, the fixed-shop bookseller licensed at medieval universities, as against a travelling pedlar. Write the one-sentence test for each and it succeeds three times. It fails on (d): snobbery is an abstract noun of conduct, the behaviour of someone who despises those they think socially beneath them, and it names no craft, no premises and no goods. There is no relation at all between snobbery and shoes — the pair exists only because '-ery' happens to end all four first words. That suffix is doing two different jobs here: the place-or-trade sense in bakery, tannery, fishery and brewery, and the quality-or-conduct sense in bravery, trickery, slavery and snobbery. The pair built on the second sense is the odd one, so (d).

• (a)Millinery : Hats — A genuine trade-to-product pair, and the one most often picked by elimination simply because the word is unfamiliar. Millinery is precisely the hat trade — a milliner makes and sells women's hats — so the relation is the tightest of the four. Unfamiliarity is not oddness, and treating it as oddness is how this question is designed to be lost.
• (b)Brewery : Alcohol — A place-to-product pair: a brewery ferments malted grain into beer, while spirits come from a distillery, so a purist can call 'alcohol' a loose label for a brewery's output. But loose is not absent — the pair still states what the establishment produces, which is the relation under test, and a slightly wide word cannot outrank a pair with no relation whatever.
• (c)Stationery : Paper — Stationery is the class of goods itself rather than the trade that makes it, which is a shade different in kind from (a) and (b) — but paper is squarely the leading item of stationery, so the goods-to-product link holds. The real trap in this option is spelling: stationery with an 'e' is writing material, stationary with an 'a' means not moving.

Odd-pair questions test the relation inside each pair, not the two words on their own. English analogy items are built from a small set of standard relations — worker to tool, place to product, trade to product, part to whole, cause to effect, degree of intensity, and synonym or antonym — and the examiner makes three pairs share one relation while the fourth quietly uses another or none. The reliable method is to write the relation of each pair as a single sentence of a fixed shape, here 'X is the trade, place or class of goods that deals in Y'. Three of the pairs let you write that sentence; the pair that defeats it is the answer. This particular item adds a second layer by choosing four first words that all end in '-ery', a suffix that in English carries two unrelated senses — a place or trade (bakery, brewery, tannery, fishery, pottery) and a quality or a pattern of conduct (bravery, trickery, slavery, snobbery).

The discriminating step is to stop hunting for the odd word and hunt for the odd relation. Candidates lose this question in one of two ways. The first is unfamiliarity: 'millinery' is the rarest word on the page, so it feels like the outsider — but a word you do not know is not thereby unrelated to its partner, and millinery to hats is in fact the tightest pair of the four. The second is over-precision: a well-read candidate notices that a brewery makes beer rather than 'alcohol' in general, or that stationery is merchandise rather than a trade, and talks themselves into (b) or (c). Both objections are real and both are about degree. Snobbery to shoes is not loose, it is empty — no craft, no premises, no goods, no product. When one pair has no relation at all, an imperfect relation in another pair never wins. That ordering — absence beats imprecision — is the single rule that settles most odd-pair items, and it is worth carrying into the exam hall as a fixed tie-breaker.

• Millinery = the trade of making and selling women's hats; from 'Milaner', a dealer in fancy wares imported from Milan, recorded in English from the sixteenth century
• Brewery = premises where beer or ale is brewed by fermenting malted grain; a distillery, by contrast, concentrates alcohol by distillation and is what produces spirits
• Stationery (with an 'e') = writing materials such as paper, envelopes and pens; from 'stationer', a bookseller trading from a fixed station or shop, as opposed to an itinerant pedlar. Stationary (with an 'a') means not moving
• The suffix '-ery' has two distinct senses: a place or trade (bakery, tannery, fishery, brewery) and a quality or conduct (bravery, trickery, slavery, snobbery) — the whole question turns on that split
• Snob and snobbery were pushed into common English by W. M. Thackeray, whose Punch series 'The Snobs of England' (1846-47) was collected as The Book of Snobs in 1848

• Choosing the unfamiliar word (millinery) rather than the unrelated pair — the commonest way this item is lost
• Matching on the shared '-ery' ending instead of on the relation, which is exactly the false signal the setter planted
• Talking yourself into 'Brewery : Alcohol' because a brewery strictly makes beer — an imprecise relation still beats no relation

BPSC keeps a short reasoning block at the very end of the General Studies paper and fills part of it with vocabulary-driven verbal items — odd pair, odd word out, alphabetical order — where the deciding knowledge is what a word actually means. UPSC moved this family into CSAT Paper II after 2011, where it appears as analogy and classification under general mental ability; before 2011 a handful of such items sat inside the General Studies prelims paper itself, including a code-language question in 1999.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Find the odd pair among the following options.

  • (a)Bakery : Bread
  • (b)Tannery : Leather
  • (c)Pottery : Pots
  • (d)Bravery : Boots

  Answer(d) Bravery : Boots — bakery, tannery and pottery each name a place or craft and its product, while bravery is an abstract quality with no connection to boots.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following words means writing materials such as paper, envelopes and pens?

  • (a)Stationary
  • (b)Stationery
  • (c)Statuary
  • (d)Stationer

  Answer(b) Stationery — with an 'e' it is the goods; 'stationary' with an 'a' means not moving, 'statuary' means statues, and a 'stationer' is the person who sells the goods.