His writings on the subject are obscure.
- (a)murky
- (b)vague
- (c)obvious
- (d)uncertain
Correct — C, obvious. 'Obscure' writing is writing that is hard to make out or hard to follow, so the reverse is writing whose sense is plain at once — 'obvious'. Read the set as a whole and it decides itself: murky, vague and uncertain all crowd around the idea of being unclear, leaving one word facing the other way.
- (a)murky — 'Murky' means dark and hard to see through — a near-synonym of 'obscure' rather than its opposite.
- (b)vague — 'Vague' means imprecise or ill-defined, which restates 'obscure' instead of reversing it.
- (d)uncertain — 'Uncertain' means not settled or not known for sure, and that again sits on the unclear side of the line.
An antonym item on 'obscure' in its sense of not clearly expressed or hard to understand; the reverse of that is 'obvious'.
When three of the four options mean roughly the same thing, an antonym item has already told you the answer — the odd word out is the one facing the other way. It still pays to fix which sense of 'obscure' the sentence uses. Applied to writings it means hard to follow; applied to a person or a village it means little known, and that second sense would take 'famous' or 'renowned' as its opposite. No such choice is printed here.
- 'Obscure' carries two common senses — hard to understand, and little known.
- Abstruse, recondite and cryptic are near-synonyms of the first sense.
- 'Obvious' descends from Latin obvius, 'lying in the way', which is what makes it something you cannot miss.
- Picking 'vague' because it is the neatest synonym on offer.
- Reading 'uncertain' as an opposite when it also means unclear.
Asked as an antonym item — choose the word opposite in meaning to the underlined word 'obscure'.
No directly related past PYQ was found.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Select the word opposite in meaning to 'ambiguous'.
- (a)unclear
- (b)equivocal
- (c)unequivocal
- (d)doubtful
Answer(c) unequivocal — it admits only one interpretation, while the other three all mean open to more than one.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Select the word opposite in meaning to 'abstruse'.
- (a)deep
- (b)complex
- (c)straightforward
- (d)obscure
Answer(c) straightforward — 'abstruse' means hard to understand, so the reverse is easy to follow.