SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 11 September 2024, Shift 3 · English Comprehension · Question 8 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 underlined word in the given sentence. Success is not a destination, it’s a journey.

(a)Failure
(b)Sensation
(c)Victory
(d)Opulence

Answer

Why

Correct — A. The underline does not survive into the plain-text response sheet, but the options fix the target: Success is the word in the sentence that has an opposite among them.

Failure is that opposite — the state of not achieving what was aimed at, set against the state of achieving it. Option (a).

The pair is definitional rather than a matter of degree, which is what an antonym item wants when the target is an abstract noun.

Why the others are wrong

(b)
Sensation — Sensation means a physical feeling, or a person or thing causing widespread excitement. It sits on a different axis from success and does not negate it.
(c)
Victory — Victory is winning a contest, a near synonym of success. It is at the same end of the scale, which is what makes it the planted trap.
(d)
Opulence — Opulence is great wealth or luxuriousness. Wealth may follow success, but the opposite of opulence is poverty, not failure.

Concept

An antonym item is settled by axis first. Ask what scale the target word sits on, then keep the option that runs the other way along that same scale.

Success sits on the achievement scale, whose far end is failure. Victory is on that scale too, but at the same end as success.

Sensation and opulence belong to other scales entirely — feeling and wealth — so neither can be an opposite whatever its tone.

The rest of the sentence is decoration: saying success is a journey rather than a destination is a claim about how it is experienced, not a clue to its opposite.

The bank preserves the sentence as plain text, so the underline is gone. The keyed answer and the option set together identify Success as the target word.

Key facts

Failure is the standard antonym of success, both naming the outcome of an attempt.
Victory names winning a contest, which puts it on the synonym side in an antonym item.
Opulence means great wealth or lavishness, and its own opposite is poverty or austerity.

Study next

Antonym pairs on the achievement axis: triumph and defeat, gain and lossNear synonyms planted as antonym distractorsAdjective antonym pairs of the same kind: brittle and resilient, rigid and flexible

Common traps

Hunting for the opposite of journey or destination, neither of which has an option here.
Picking victory on a fast read because it and success both feel like winning words.

SSC prints a whole sentence but tests one word inside it, and here the wrong options include a near synonym of the target.

An antonym item also runs at English Q.14 (Brittle, keyed Resilient) of this shift.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.