SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 10 September 2024, Shift 3 · English Comprehension · Question 9 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 synonym of the bracketed word in the following sentence to fill in the blank. The media, these days, constructs ________(misleading) narratives on politics and celebrities to increase the viewership.

(a)candid
(b)sincere
(c)mendacious
(d)true

Answer

Why

Correct — C. The bracketed word is misleading, so the blank needs a word meaning giving a false impression.

mendacious means lying or untruthful, from Latin mendax. Applied to narratives it says those narratives are false, which is the charge misleading makes here.

The other three all mean honest or straightforward, and the sentence's own logic — narratives built to increase the viewership — will not carry praise.

Option (c) is the only word on the critical side of the line.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
candid — candid means frank and open, saying what one really thinks. It sits near the opposite of misleading and would praise the media rather than accuse them.
(b)
sincere — sincere means genuine and free from pretence. Like candid it falls on the honest side of the line, which the sentence's accusation does not allow.
(d)
true — true means in accordance with fact, the flat opposite of misleading. It is there to catch a candidate who misreads the bracket as the word to match against.

Concept

A synonym-in-context item gives you two checks, and both must pass.

First, the bracketed word fixes the direction of the meaning. Misleading is critical, so every complimentary option goes at once — that alone removes candid, sincere and true.

Second, the survivor must fit the grammar and the normal company the word keeps. Mendacious is an adjective used of people and of what they produce, so mendacious narratives is an ordinary phrase.

Mendacious is stronger than misleading. Something misleading may be accidental, while mendacious implies deliberate lying.

These items ask for the nearest available word rather than an exact equivalence, and nothing milder is offered in this set.

Key facts

Mendacious means untruthful or lying, from Latin mendax meaning lying.
Mendacity is its noun form.
Candid and sincere both describe honesty, so neither can render misleading.

Study next

Adjectives of deceit: mendacious, duplicitous, spurious, speciousUsing the positive or negative direction of a word to halve an option listAdjective and noun pairs such as mendacious and mendacity

Common traps

Picking true or sincere by reading the sentence as a defence of the media.
Skipping the bracket and choosing whichever word merely fits the sentence.

SSC supplies the target word in brackets so the blank can be filled without disturbing the rest of the sentence.

The bare-word version opens this section — also 10 Sep 2024, 16:00, English Q.1 — and a meaning-in-context item runs at English Q.17 in the same shift.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.