NDA (II) 2022 GAT Q47: A sea

Q: What is the answer to NDA (II) 2022 GAT Q47?

B. Correct — B, a complete change. 'A sea change' means a deep and thoroughgoing transformation rather than a small adjustment. It comes from Ariel's song in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, where a drowned man is said to 'suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange'.

NDA (II) 2022 General Ability Test · Question 47 of 150

Question text verified against the official NDA question paper.

A sea change

(a)Change in the sea tides
(b)A complete change
(c)Change like sea
(d)Changed sea with pollution

Answer

Why

Correct — B, a complete change. 'A sea change' means a deep and thoroughgoing transformation rather than a small adjustment. It comes from Ariel's song in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, where a drowned man is said to 'suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange'.

Why the others are wrong

(a)Change in the sea tides — A literal reading of 'sea'; the phrase is used of shifts in policy, attitude or fortune, not of the tide.
(c)Change like sea — This keeps 'sea' as a comparison and misses the settled meaning the whole phrase has acquired.
(d)Changed sea with pollution — An environmental reading invented from the word 'sea'; nothing in the idiom refers to pollution.

Concept

'A sea change' means a profound, far-reaching transformation.

The phrase entered English from Ariel's song in The Tempest, describing a body altered utterly by the sea. Present-day writing applies it to politics, business and public mood — 'a sea change in public opinion'. Because it already means a total change, pairing it with 'slight' or 'minor' is a common misuse.

Key facts

Shakespeare coined the phrase in The Tempest, in Ariel's song in Act 1, Scene 2.
The line runs 'But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange'.
In modern use it means a radical change of attitude, policy or condition.

Study next

idioms coined by Shakespearewords for change — transformation, metamorphosis, overhaulidioms from the sea — all at sea, plain sailing, sail close to the windmatching the strength of an idiom to the sentence around it

Common traps

Reading 'sea' literally and choosing the tide or the pollution option.
Weakening the idiom to mean a small or partial change.

Asked as an idioms-and-phrases item — choose the option that gives the meaning of the phrase.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.

Practice

practice — not a real PYQ
'All at sea' means:
- (a)sailing abroad
- (b)confused and unable to understand
- (c)very wealthy
- (d)away on holiday
Answer(b) confused and unable to understand — the image is of someone adrift with no landmarks.
practice — not a real PYQ
'A sea change in policy' most nearly means:
- (a)a minor amendment
- (b)a complete transformation
- (c)a temporary rule
- (d)a change made at the coast
Answer(b) a complete transformation — the idiom always carries the sense of a thoroughgoing change.