NDA (I) 2018 General Ability Test · Question 10 of 150

Correct — B, 'plentiful'. Abundant means present in large quantities, more than enough, and 'plentiful' says the same thing about quantity — abundant food is food there is plenty of.

• (a)little — 'Little' names a small quantity and reverses the sense of the underlined word.
• (c)delicious — Delicious describes how the food tastes, not how much of it there is.
• (d)wholesome — Wholesome describes food that is good for health, again a quality of the food rather than its quantity.

'Abundant' is a word about quantity, so the option that matches it must also be about quantity.

Two options describe what the food was like rather than how much of it there was, and they tempt only because they sit so comfortably in a sentence about a mess. Fixing the axis first — is the underlined word about amount, quality, speed or feeling — is the habit that makes vocabulary blocks quick.

• 'Abundance' is the noun and 'abundantly' the adverb, as in 'abundantly clear'.
• 'Plenty' is a noun and 'plentiful' its adjective — a plentiful harvest.
• 'Scarce' and 'meagre' sit at the other end of the same scale.

• Picking a word that fits the sentence pleasantly but describes a different property.
• Reading 'abundant' as a compliment about quality.

Asked as a synonym item — choose the word closest in meaning to the underlined word.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Choose the word closest in meaning to 'copious' in 'copious notes'.

  • (a)brief
  • (b)plentiful
  • (c)untidy
  • (d)borrowed

  Answer(b) plentiful — copious means in large quantity.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Choose the word most opposite in meaning to 'abundant'.

  • (a)plentiful
  • (b)ample
  • (c)scarce
  • (d)generous

  Answer(c) scarce — scarcity is the reverse of abundance.