He is always captious.
- (a)worried
- (b)passionate
- (c)faultfinding
- (d)jovial
Correct — C, faultfinding. 'Captious' describes a person given to picking on small faults and raising petty objections, so 'He is always captious' says he is habitually faultfinding. The adverb 'always' backs that reading — it points to a settled habit of nit-picking rather than a passing mood.
- (a)worried — 'Worried' names anxiety about an outcome. A captious man is not anxious about things, he is critical of them.
- (b)passionate — 'Passionate' measures strength of feeling and says nothing about picking holes in what others do.
- (d)jovial — 'Jovial' means cheerful and good-humoured, which runs against the carping tone of the sentence.
'Captious' comes from the Latin capere, to take or catch, and describes someone who catches at trivial faults in what others say or do.
The word is easy to mis-hear as 'capacious', which means roomy, or to tie to 'captivating', which means charming — and either wrong guess pushes a candidate towards the pleasant-sounding options. The sentence supplies its own check: 'always' is doing the work of naming a fixed disposition, so the answer has to be a habitual-trait word.
- 'Captious' is applied to people, critics, remarks and questions that raise petty objections.
- The look-alike 'capacious' means roomy or spacious and is unrelated in meaning.
- Choosing a pleasant-sounding option because the word resembles 'captivating'.
- Reading 'captious' as a form of 'capacious'.
Asked as a synonym item — replace the underlined adjective with the option nearest to it in meaning in this sentence.
No directly related past PYQ was found.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Choose the word nearest in meaning to 'captious'. The captious reviewer objected to every second line of the novel.
- (a)generous
- (b)faultfinding
- (c)hurried
- (d)indifferent
Answer(b) faultfinding — a captious critic raises petty objections.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Choose the word nearest in meaning to 'carping'. His carping remarks demoralised the whole team.
- (a)praising
- (b)faultfinding
- (c)casual
- (d)brief
Answer(b) faultfinding — 'carping' names the same habit of persistent petty criticism.