‘Conscious’ and ‘Conscience’
- (a)‘Conscious’ means sense of right and wrong, and ‘conscience’ means awareness about something
- (b)‘Conscious’ means alert, and ‘conscience’ means presence of mind
- (c)‘Conscious’ means intent, and ‘conscience’ means unprincipled action
- (d)‘Conscious’ means aware, and ‘conscience’ means sense of right and wrong
Correct — D, ‘Conscious’ means aware, and ‘conscience’ means sense of right and wrong. Conscious is an adjective: a patient is conscious after surgery, and you are conscious of a noise. Conscience is a noun, the inner moral faculty that a guilty person is said to be troubled by.
- (a)‘Conscious’ means sense of right and wrong, and ‘conscience’ means awareness about something — Both glosses are correct in themselves but attached to the wrong word — they are simply swapped.
- (b)‘Conscious’ means alert, and ‘conscience’ means presence of mind — Alert is close enough for conscious, yet conscience is a moral sense and never presence of mind, and a half-right option is still wrong.
- (c)‘Conscious’ means intent, and ‘conscience’ means unprincipled action — Conscious does not mean intent, and unprincipled action is what the derived word unconscionable describes, not conscience.
Conscious is an adjective about awareness; conscience is a noun about morality. Both descend from Latin conscire, to know with, but they part company completely in modern use.
Grammar settles this item before meaning does. Try each word in a sentence — ‘she was conscious of the risk’ needs an adjective, ‘her conscience troubled her’ needs a noun — and every option that gives conscious a noun meaning collapses at once.
- Conscious and conscience share the Latin root conscire, yet one settled on awareness and the other on morality.
- Conscience is a countable noun, as in a clear conscience or a guilty conscience.
- Conscientious is the third member of the family and means careful and diligent.
- Treating conscience as an adjective.
- Accepting an option because only its first half rings true.
Asked as a paired-words item — pick the option that gives the correct meaning of both words.
No directly related past PYQ was found.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Fill in the blank with the correct word. He could not sleep because his __________ troubled him.
- (a)conscious
- (b)conscience
- (c)conscientious
- (d)consciously
Answer(b) conscience — the moral sense, and the only noun on the list that fits.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Choose the option that gives the correct meaning of ‘Conscious’ and ‘Conscientious’.
- (a)‘Conscious’ means aware, and ‘conscientious’ means careful and diligent
- (b)‘Conscious’ means careful and diligent, and ‘conscientious’ means aware
- (c)‘Conscious’ means sense of right and wrong, and ‘conscientious’ means aware
- (d)‘Conscious’ means diligent, and ‘conscientious’ means sense of right and wrong
Answer(a) ‘Conscious’ means aware, and ‘conscientious’ means careful and diligent.