SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 12 September 2024, Shift 1 · English Comprehension · Question 11 of 99

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 synonym for the underlined word in the given sentence. His ambition in life is to become a happy and satisfied man.

(a)Eagerness
(b)Amend
(c)Satisfaction
(d)Apathy

Answer

Why

Correct — A. The word under test is ambition — a strong desire to achieve something, and the drive behind it.

Eagerness means keen desire or enthusiasm, and desire is the shared core: an ambition is what you eagerly want, not what you already have.

That gap is what the item turns on. Option (a) names the wanting, while option (c) names the state the man wants to reach.

Why the others are wrong

(b)
Amend — Amend is a verb meaning to alter or correct something, usually a text or a law. 'Ambition' is a noun of desire, and correcting is not wanting.
(c)
Satisfaction — Satisfaction is the contentment felt once a desire is met — the end state, not the drive towards it. The sentence already carries that end state in 'satisfied'.
(d)
Apathy — Apathy is a lack of interest, enthusiasm or concern. That is the opposite of ambition, not a synonym for it.

Concept

A synonym question set inside a sentence is not a dictionary match. The replacement has to fit the slot the original word fills, and here that slot is a noun of desire.

Ambition names what someone strongly wants and the push towards it. Its usual synonyms are aspiration, aim, drive and eagerness.

Words for the result of that desire — satisfaction, contentment, fulfilment — sit on the far side of the process, and words for its absence, such as apathy, invert it. Sorting the options into desire, result and absence settles the item before you weigh nuance.

The response sheet reproduces the sentence without its underlining. The option set fixes the tested word as ambition: it is the one word in the sentence whose synonym appears among the four.

Key facts

Ambition = a strong desire to achieve something, and the drive behind that desire.
Eagerness = keen desire or enthusiasm, the closest of the four options to that sense.
Apathy = lack of interest, enthusiasm or concern, which is the antonym of ambition.
Amend = to change or correct something, most often a text, a law or a mistake.

Study next

Nouns in the desire family: aspiration, zeal, ardour, avidityWords for indifference: apathy, antipathy, lethargy, inertiaAmend, emend and mend — three verbs that look alike and are used differently

Common traps

Picking satisfaction because 'satisfied' appears later in the sentence — the echo is bait, not a clue.
Testing which option reads most smoothly in the frame instead of which one matches the meaning, since 'His eagerness in life' does read a little oddly.

Synonym-in-a-sentence items name the word in the stem and hide a near miss among the options. Apathy, a wrong option here, is itself the keyed answer to a one-word-substitution item for 'Lack of interest, enthusiasm or concern' at 19 Sep 2024, 16:00, English Q.10 — the same word worked from the other end.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.