SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 11 September 2024, Shift 1 · General Intelligence and Reasoning · Question 19 of 95

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 10 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.

‘Summer’ is related to ‘Season’ in the same way as ‘Cotton’ is related to ‘________’.

(a)Grain
(b)Tree
(c)Dye
(d)Cloth

Answer

Why

Correct — D. Rule: the first word names a member, the second names the class it belongs to.

Summer is one of the seasons. It is not a cause of a season and not a product made from one.

Applying the same link, cotton must be paired with a class it belongs to. Among the four choices only cloth does that job: cotton is one of the fabrics, as summer is one of the seasons.

That is option (d).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Grain — Grain is a class, but not cotton's. Grains are the edible seeds of cereals such as wheat and rice, and cotton is a fibre crop rather than one of them.
(b)
Tree — This swaps the link for a source relation — where a thing comes from, not what it is a kind of. Cotton is also a shrub crop, not a tree.
(c)
Dye — Dye is something applied to cotton, not a category containing it. Summer does not stand in that relation to season, so the analogy breaks.

Concept

Word analogies turn on the type of link, not on how strongly two words feel connected. The links that recur are member-to-class, part-to-whole, tool-to-user, cause-to-effect and product-to-source.

The given pair here is member-to-class: summer is one of the seasons. The blank must therefore be a class that contains cotton.

Fix the link as a sentence before you look at the options — 'X is a kind of Y' — and the choices that merely sound related fall away on their own.

Cotton is a fibre and a crop before it is a cloth, so the pairing rests on reading cotton as the fabric, the sense in which people say a cotton shirt. Read as a raw fibre it would sit closer to plant than to cloth, which is why the item feels loose.

Key facts

The link tested is member-to-class: summer is one of the seasons.
Cotton belongs to the class cloth when the word is read as a fabric.
A source link (cotton from a plant) and a class link (cotton is a cloth) are different relations.
Naming the link as a sentence is the fastest filter on the four options.

Study next

Member-to-class against part-to-whole analogiesWord-pair odd-one-out items, where three pairs share a link and one does notProduct-to-source pairs, which are the link this item does not test

Common traps

Choosing tree because cotton is a plant product, which swaps a class link for a source link.
Judging by strength of association rather than by naming the link.
Forgetting that the blank must be the class, not a second member.

SSC writes this frame as 'A is related to B in the same way as C is related to ___' — also at 11 Sep 2024, 12:30, Reasoning Q.9 (Lavish : Austere :: Prejudiced : Impartial), which tests antonyms rather than class membership. The odd-pair version of the same skill is at Reasoning Q.9 of the same paper.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.