Select the most appropriate ANTONYM of the underlined word in the following sentence. In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Shylock's connivance aimed to jeopardise Antonio's life.
- (a)Safeguard
- (b)Jape
- (c)Risk
- (d)Peril
Answer
Why
Correct — A. The sentence describes a scheme that aimed to jeopardise Antonio's life — secret complicity working towards harm.
Safeguard is the opposite pole: to protect something, to keep it out of danger. Plotting to endanger a life and acting to protect it are exact contraries.
Risk and Peril name the danger itself, so they stand on the same side as the sentence rather than against it. That leaves option (a).
Why the others are wrong
- (b)Jape — Jape means a joke or prank. It is neither a synonym nor an opposite of secret plotting to harm — an antonym has to reverse the meaning, and a harmless jest merely sits outside it.
- (c)Risk — Risk is danger, which is what the plotting produces. It restates the sentence instead of reversing it, and it means much what option (d) does, so neither can be the single answer.
- (d)Peril — Peril is grave danger. Like Risk it sits on the harm side of the sentence, which makes it a synonym of what the schemer intended, not its opposite.
Concept
Connivance is secret cooperation in a wrong — knowing about it and quietly allowing or assisting it. The verb is connive.
An antonym must reverse the whole direction of an idea, not merely differ from it. Connivance works in secret towards someone's harm, so its contrary is open protection: safeguard.
When the headword is unfamiliar, read the action the sentence gives it. Here it is spelled out for you — the scheme aimed to jeopardise a life — and the opposite of endangering a life is guarding it.
The underlining does not survive extraction from the response sheet. Both candidates in the sentence, connivance and jeopardise, point the same way, because the reverse of a secret plot to endanger a life is to safeguard it, so the keyed option holds on either reading.
Key facts
- Connivance means secret complicity in a wrong, whether by assisting it or by deliberately ignoring it.
- To jeopardise is to put something at risk, and its direct antonym is to safeguard.
- Risk and peril are near-synonyms, so in a single-answer antonym item neither can be the key.
- A jape is a joke or a prank.
Study next
Common traps
- Answering with a synonym of the danger in the sentence, since Risk and Peril both look relevant
- Building an antonym for connivance from scratch instead of reading what the connivance aimed to do
SSC sets antonyms both as a bare word and inside a sentence. English Q.9 of this shift gives Deficient alone with Ample keyed, and Q.20 gives Meander. Here the sentence supplies the clue that the bare word would not.
The embedded antonym also runs at 9 Sep 2024, 12:30, English Q.7, where inquisitive is keyed to Disinterested.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.