SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 11 September 2024, Shift 3 · General Intelligence and Reasoning · Question 5 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 word pair that best represents a similar relationship to the one expressed in the pair of words given below. (The words must be considered as meaningful English words and must not be related to each other based on the number of letters/number of consonants/vowels in the word) Calcium : Osteomalacia

(a)Lungs : Tuberculosis
(b)Iron : Anaemia
(c)Heart : Cardiovascular
(d)Stomach : Blindness

Answer

Why

Correct — B.

Rule: the pair is nutrient : the deficiency disease it causes. A shortage of calcium softens adult bone, and that softening is osteomalacia.

Iron : Anaemia repeats the shape exactly. Iron is the nutrient, and too little of it causes iron-deficiency anaemia, so option (b) is the match.

Both halves have to survive: the first word must be a nutrient rather than an organ, and the second must be a disease of lacking it.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Lungs : Tuberculosis — Lungs is an organ, not a nutrient, and tuberculosis is an infection of that organ rather than a disease of deficiency. Both halves of the relation change.
(c)
Heart : Cardiovascular — Cardiovascular is not a disease at all but an adjective for the heart-and-vessel system, and heart is an organ rather than a nutrient.
(d)
Stomach : Blindness — Stomach is an organ, and blindness is not a disease of the stomach. Nothing links this pair the way a nutrient links to its deficiency disease.

Concept

An analogy is decided by naming the relation in words before looking at the options. 'Calcium causes osteomalacia' is wrong; a shortage of calcium causes it, and the shortage is the load-bearing part.

Stated as nutrient : deficiency disease, three options fall away at the first word alone, because lungs, heart and stomach are organs.

The rider printed with the question also blocks the shortcut of matching pairs by letter, vowel or consonant counts, so the pairing has to be semantic.

Anaemia has several causes, but the pairing SSC is testing is the classic one, where the deficiency of the named nutrient produces the named condition.

Key facts

Osteomalacia is a softening of bone in adults, linked to a deficiency of calcium and vitamin D.
A deficiency of iron causes iron-deficiency anaemia.
Rickets is the childhood counterpart of osteomalacia.

Study next

Vitamin deficiency diseases such as scurvy from vitamin C and beriberi from thiamineOrgan-and-disease analogies, which are the nearest rival relation to this oneCause-and-effect analogies generally, where the direction of the pair decides the answer

Common traps

Naming the relation as mineral and bone disease, which is too narrow to reach iron and anaemia
Accepting an organ-and-disease pair because it also sounds medical
Reversing the direction so that the disease is read as the cause of the nutrient

The rider about letter and vowel counts is printed with this item, which blocks matching by spelling. The same word-pair format returns at Reasoning Q.12 of the 10 Sep 2024, 16:00 shift and at Reasoning Q.4 of the 18 Sep 2024, 16:00 shift, both with purely semantic pairs.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.