SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 11 September 2024, Shift 3 · English Comprehension · Question 14 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 ANTONYM of the given word. Brittle

(a)Crunchy
(b)Resilient
(c)Delicate
(d)Aloof

Answer

Why

Correct — B. Brittle means hard but liable to snap or shatter under stress — a dry twig, old plastic, weathered glass. It gives way suddenly, without bending first.

Resilient is the opposite property in the same frame: able to take stress, bend and spring back without breaking, and of a person, to recover quickly from a setback.

Brittle breaks, resilient rebounds — option (b).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Crunchy — Crunchy describes texture and sound under the teeth, not how a material fails under load. A crunchy biscuit is in fact brittle, so this is no reversal at all.
(c)
Delicate — Delicate means easily damaged — a near synonym of brittle, planted where the antonym should be. It repeats the headword instead of reversing it.
(d)
Aloof — Aloof means distant or unfriendly in manner. It belongs to a different field of meaning entirely and has no physical sense to oppose brittle.

Concept

Both words start in materials and are then lent to people.

A brittle material fractures with almost no deformation first; a resilient one absorbs the energy and returns to its shape. Applied to a person, brittle suggests someone who cracks under pressure and resilient someone who comes back from it.

Because the two senses run in parallel, resilient reverses brittle whether the sentence is about steel or about a candidate on results day.

In engineering the strict opposite of brittle is ductile — a material that deforms before it breaks. SSC works with the everyday pair, so resilient is what an antonym item wants.

Key facts

Brittle: hard but easily broken, fracturing rather than bending.
Resilient: able to withstand difficulty and spring back into shape or spirits.
Delicate and fragile are near synonyms of brittle, not antonyms of it.
The same headword Brittle is set as a synonym item on 23 Sep 2024, 09:00, English Q.12, where the key is Fragile.

Study next

Antonym items that plant a synonym of the headword among the optionsAdjective pairs for how things fail: brittle and ductile, rigid and flexibleThe resilience family: resilient, resilience, bounce back as its idiom

Common traps

Choosing Delicate because it feels closest to the headword.
Reading Crunchy as a physical opposite when it is only a texture word.
Expecting the antonym of a physical adjective to be physical too, when resilient covers both senses.

One headword can come back with the task reversed. Brittle is a synonym item on 23 Sep 2024, 09:00, English Q.12, keyed Fragile, and an antonym item here — so read the instruction line before the options.

This shift also runs an antonym item at English Q.8, where the underlined Success is keyed against Failure.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.