Everybody finds his own work ________ whereas he feels that others have delightful jobs.
- (a)tedious
- (b)fabulous
- (c)unprofitable
- (d)indecent
Correct — A, tedious. 'Whereas' sets the two halves of the sentence against each other, so the blank must carry the reverse of the 'delightful jobs' that other people are imagined to have, and 'tedious' — wearying because it drags on without variety — is that reverse.
- (b)fabulous — 'Fabulous' is a near-synonym of 'delightful', so both halves would say the same thing and 'whereas' would have nothing left to contrast.
- (c)unprofitable — 'Unprofitable' judges what work pays or yields, not how it feels to do it, so it does not answer the 'delightful' offered in the second half.
- (d)indecent — 'Indecent' means offensive to accepted standards of decency, a moral charge with no bearing on whether a job is enjoyable.
A word-choice item settled by a contrast marker rather than by the sense of the blank taken on its own.
The sentence gives one explicit signal, 'whereas', and one explicit value, 'delightful'. A candidate who reads the second half first sees that the blank is forced to carry the opposite of 'delightful', and three options fall away without having to be weighed against one another.
- 'Tedious' descends from Latin taedium, meaning weariness, and describes something wearying because it goes on without variety.
- 'Whereas' is a subordinating conjunction of contrast, the formal cousin of 'while' in its contrasting sense.
- Choosing the word that reads well in the blank on its own and ignoring the contrast signal that governs it.
Asked as a fill-the-blank item in which a contrast word decides the answer before any option is read.
Please don’t give me any more, I have had ________.
- (a) few
- (b) too little
- (c) little
- (d) enough
Answer(d) enough
Same skill — the rest of the sentence, not the blank, decides the word. That NDA item is settled by the refusal in the first half, which only a word meaning sufficiency can explain; this one is settled by 'whereas' pulling against 'delightful'.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Choose the word that best fills the blank — She found the lecture ________ whereas her classmates thought it was gripping.
- (a)absorbing
- (b)tedious
- (c)valuable
- (d)brief
Answer(b) tedious — 'whereas' demands the reverse of 'gripping'.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Choose the word that best fills the blank — The village road was ________ while the highway beyond it was smooth.
- (a)level
- (b)rough
- (c)short
- (d)new
Answer(b) rough — 'while' sets the road against the smooth highway.