SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 10 September 2024, Shift 2 · English Comprehension · Question 2 of 100

Text as printed on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; answer per SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 6 September 2026.

Where this paper and its answers come from

SSC does not publish CGL question papers or a public answer key. The questions and options here are reproduced as printed on a candidate's own response sheet for this shift — the Commission's text, unchanged. Each answer is SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet; SSC allowed challenges to it and never publishes a final key. The solutions are written by UnlockIAS.

Select the most appropriate meaning of the phrase in bold. Your so-called friend has cooked your goose.

(a)To interfere with, disrupt or ruin something for someone
(b)When something develops completely and reaches maturity; when a child becomes
(c)To complete a lot of work or a wide range of things
(d)To spend a lot of time and energy but achieve nothing

Answer

Why

Correct — A. The phrase in bold is cook someone's goose: to spoil their plans or ruin their chances, usually by an act that cannot be undone.

The sentence supplies the frame — a 'so-called friend' has done something to you — so the meaning must name damage inflicted on a person.

Option (a), 'to interfere with, disrupt or ruin something for someone', is exactly that, stated in plain words.

Why the others are wrong

(b)
When something develops completely and reaches maturity; when a child becomes — This describes something reaching maturity, a process of growth rather than an act of sabotage, and nothing in the sentence is developing.
(c)
To complete a lot of work or a wide range of things — Getting a lot of work done is a claim about productivity. It is neither harmful nor aimed at another person, which the idiom requires.
(d)
To spend a lot of time and energy but achieve nothing — Effort that achieves nothing wastes the doer's own time. The goose belongs to the victim, not to the person who cooks it.

Concept

Idiom items are decided by the whole phrase, never by its parts. Nothing in 'cook' or in 'goose' points to ruin.

The reliable move is to read the carrier sentence for who acts on whom. Here a 'so-called friend' acts on 'you', so the answer has to be transitive and hostile.

That test alone strikes out the three options describing growth, productivity and wasted effort, none of which has a victim in it.

Option (b) is printed unfinished in the response sheet — it breaks off at 'when a child becomes'. The truncation does not change the sense it is reaching for, which is maturing.

Key facts

Cook someone's goose means to ruin their plans or their chances.
The idiom is transitive and always takes a victim, as in 'cooked your goose'.
A carrier sentence that names an actor and a target rules out any meaning without a victim.

Study next

Idioms of ruin and sabotage: cook someone's goose, queer the pitch, pull the rug from underReading the carrier sentence for who acts on whom before picking a meaningIdiom items whose options are plain-English definitions rather than other idioms

Common traps

Guessing from the word 'cook' and picking the option about work being completed.
Treating the truncated option (b) as a printing trick and choosing it for that reason.

An idiom can be set inside a carrier sentence, as here, or bare. This shift's English Q.20 asks what 'Bite the bullet' means with no sentence around it, which removes the who-acts-on-whom clue that this question hands you.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.