SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 12 September 2024, Shift 1 · English Comprehension · Question 15 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 ANTONYM of the given word. Receive

(a)Reward
(b)Admit
(c)Exile
(d)Fund

Answer

Why

Correct — C. Take receive in its 'take someone in' sense — to welcome or admit a person into a place or a group, as in 'the family received their guests'.

Exile is the reverse movement: to expel a person from a place and keep them out. Welcome in against drive out is a clean opposition.

Option (b), 'admit', pushes in the same direction as 'receive' rather than against it, and that is what marks it as the planted trap. Option (c) is the reversal the item wants.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Reward — Reward is to give something in recognition of merit or service. It is a kind of giving, but its own opposite is to punish or withhold, and it does not reverse 'receive'.
(b)
Admit — Admit means to let someone in, which is what 'receive' does in this sense. It is a synonym sitting in an antonym item, and the item asks for the opposite.
(d)
Fund — Fund means to provide money for a person or a project. It belongs to financing, not to admitting or expelling, and stands in no relation to 'receive'.

Concept

Receive carries two senses, and an antonym item is always asking about one of them.

In the 'get something handed to you' sense the opposites are give and send. In the 'take a person in' sense — receive a guest, receive a delegation — the opposite is to shut out or drive away.

Exile is the strong form of that second opposition: to banish a person from a country or a community. When an option set offers no reversal of a word's first sense, test the second sense before deciding the item is broken.

The pairing works on the 'receive a person' sense. Against 'receive a letter' the antonym would be 'send' or 'give', and neither is offered — so the option set itself tells you which sense is under test.

Key facts

Exile = to banish or expel a person from their country or community, and also the state of being banished.
Receive covers both getting something given and welcoming a person in.
Admit is a synonym of 'receive' in that welcoming sense, which is why it appears among the options.

Study next

Words of banishment: exile, expel, deport, ostracise, banishAntonym sets that turn on the second sense of a common wordReceive, perceive and conceive — three verbs from the Latin root capere

Common traps

Choosing admit, which means the same as 'receive' here rather than the reverse.
Looking only for the opposite of 'receive a gift' and concluding that no option fits.

Antonym items give the word bare, with no sentence, so you have to supply the sense yourself, and one of the four options here is a synonym rather than an opposite. The same bare-word format is used at English Q.1 of this paper, where the antonym of 'Secure' is keyed to 'Attack'.

Related PYQs

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