Rivalry between the two clans has become water under the bridge means

Correct — B, (b) It has become a thing of the past.

‘Water under the bridge’ is something in the past that cannot be undone and must simply be accepted, forgiven or forgotten. Say of a quarrel that it is water under the bridge and you are saying two things at once: it happened, and it no longer matters. The keyed option — it has become a thing of the past — is the sentence’s meaning stated plainly.

The picture behind the idiom does the explaining. Water that has passed under a bridge has gone downstream; it cannot be called back, and nobody standing on the bridge expects to see it again. Applied to a rivalry between two clans, the sentence reports that the old hostility has drifted away and is no longer live between them.

The reason the item is harder than the two idiom questions before it is that the phrase is not marked. The stem prints it as part of an ordinary sentence, with no quotation marks and no italics to say ‘this is the expression under test’. A candidate reading quickly can take the words at face value — clans, a bridge, water — and start looking for an option about rivers or about connection. The signal that an idiom is present is the mismatch between the subject and the predicate: a rivalry cannot literally become water. Whenever an abstract subject is said to have become a concrete thing, the sentence is speaking figuratively, and the phrase after ‘become’ is the one to interpret.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)The rivalry continues — ‘The rivalry continues’ states the opposite of what the sentence says. The idiom is about closure: the water has gone under the bridge and away, and the trouble with it. This option is the standard opposite-sense distractor, and it catches two kinds of reader — the one who has never met the phrase and guesses that a sentence about a rivalry is likely to be about the rivalry going on, and the one who half-remembers the idiom as being about something that keeps flowing, which is a reasonable but wrong picture. A river does keep flowing, but the idiom fixes on the water that has already passed, not on the water still coming. Whenever an option and the keyed answer are exact contraries, the item is usually testing whether the phrase is known at all rather than any finer discrimination.
• (c)It connects the two clans — ‘It connects the two clans’ reads the bridge instead of the idiom. A bridge does join two banks, and the sentence does mention two clans, so a literal reader can assemble a meaning in which the rivalry has somehow become the link between them. That is a genuine trap rather than a filler, because it is the option a careful but unidiomatic reader constructs for himself. What it ignores is which noun the phrase is built on: the expression is about the water, which is gone, and the bridge is only the vantage point from which it has been watched going. It is also worth noting that this option makes the sentence say something rather odd — that a rivalry is a connection — and an interpretation that leaves the sentence odd is usually the wrong one.
• (d)It is not forgotten — ‘It is not forgotten’ is the near miss, and the most instructive option on the list. It gets half of the idiom right: yes, the rivalry belongs to the past. But it then reverses the other half. To say a thing is water under the bridge is precisely to say that it has been let go — accepted, forgiven, or at any rate no longer worth raising. A grievance that is remembered and nursed is the opposite case, and English has its own phrases for that: to bear a grudge, to keep the wound open, to rake up the past. The option tests whether a candidate has learned the idiom’s attitude as well as its subject matter. Many idioms carry an evaluation inside them, and dropping the evaluation while keeping the topic is the commonest way of half-knowing a phrase.

English has a family of idioms for things that are over, and they differ in the attitude they take to the ending. ‘Water under the bridge’ says the matter is past and should be left alone; the tone is one of acceptance and usually of reconciliation. ‘No use crying over spilt milk’ says the loss is irreversible and regret is wasted — the tone is closer to rebuke. ‘Let bygones be bygones’ is an invitation, an active proposal to forgive, rather than a report that forgiveness has happened. ‘To bury the hatchet’ is the deliberate act of making peace. ‘To turn over a new leaf’ is about the future conduct of the person speaking, not about an old quarrel at all.

Sorting them by attitude is what makes them usable, because an option list of the kind this paper sets will often contain two idioms from the same family and ask which one the sentence needs.

The second idea in this item is figurative reading itself. A metaphor announces itself by a category mismatch: a rivalry is not the sort of thing that can literally become water, so the phrase must be doing something other than describing. Learning to notice that mismatch is more valuable than memorising any single idiom, because it tells a reader when to stop taking words at face value — including in the comprehension and the statement-analysis items later in the paper, where a stem may describe a policy as ‘a shot in the arm’ or an argument as ‘a house of cards’.

Key facts

• ‘Water under the bridge’ means something in the past that cannot be undone and must be accepted, forgiven or forgotten.
• It reports both facts at once — that the matter is over, and that it is no longer held against anybody.
• The image is of water that has already passed beneath a bridge and gone downstream, and so cannot be recalled.
• In this stem the idiom is printed without quotation marks or italics, so the candidate has to identify it from the mismatch between an abstract subject, a rivalry, and a concrete predicate, water.
• Neighbouring idioms differ in attitude: ‘no use crying over spilt milk’ rebukes regret, ‘let bygones be bygones’ proposes forgiveness, and ‘to bury the hatchet’ names the act of making peace.

Common traps

• Reading the sentence literally and answering from the bridge, which suggests connection.
• Choosing the exact opposite because the idiom is unfamiliar and a sentence about rivalry sounds as though the rivalry must continue.
• Keeping the ‘past’ half of the idiom and losing its attitude, and so selecting the option that says the matter is not forgotten.
• Failing to notice that an idiom is present at all, since this stem prints it without quotation marks or italics.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  ‘After the settlement was signed, the dispute over the boundary wall was water under the bridge for both families.’ The sentence means that the dispute

  • (a)was still being argued in court
  • (b)was over and no longer held against either side
  • (c)had been won by one of the families
  • (d)had been referred to a mediator

  Answer(b) was over and no longer held against either side — the idiom reports both that the matter is past and that it has been let go. Option (a) contradicts it, option (c) adds an outcome the idiom does not name, and option (d) describes a step towards settlement rather than the state after one.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which idiom describes the deliberate act of making peace after a quarrel, rather than the state of a quarrel being past ?

  • (a)Water under the bridge
  • (b)To cry over spilt milk
  • (c)To bury the hatchet
  • (d)To turn over a new leaf

  Answer(c) To bury the hatchet — it names an act of reconciliation between two parties. Option (a) describes the condition of an old quarrel rather than an act, option (b) is about wasted regret over an irreversible loss, and option (d) is about reforming one’s own conduct in future.