Select the most appropriate ANTONYM of the underlined word in the given sentence. One must be very strong to lift this box of glass jars.
- (a)Mighty
- (b)Weak
- (c)Complicated
- (d)Rugged
Answer
Why
Correct — B. The word being tested is strong, and the sentence fixes its sense: bodily power, the kind needed to lift a heavy box.
The direct opposite of that sense is weak — lacking the physical power to lift or carry.
Mighty and rugged sit on the same side of the pair as strong, and complicated measures intricacy rather than strength, so option (b) is the antonym.
Why the others are wrong
- (a)Mighty — Mighty is a synonym, meaning possessing great strength or power. It intensifies the underlined word instead of reversing it.
- (c)Complicated — Complicated means intricate, made of many connected parts and hard to follow. It answers how difficult something is to understand, not how strong a person is.
- (d)Rugged — Rugged means sturdy and tough, or, of ground, rough and uneven. Either sense stands closer to strong than opposed to it.
Concept
When an antonym is set inside a sentence, the sentence is there to fix which sense of the word is being tested.
Strong has several: strong tea, a strong argument, a strong wind, a strong person. Here it describes someone lifting a heavy box, so the sense is bodily power and the opposite has to answer that sense — weak, feeble, frail.
Test the direction of each option rather than its distance from the word. Mighty and rugged point the same way as strong, and complicated points at a different quality altogether.
Weak also has senses the sentence does not need — weak tea, a weak argument — but it is the standard opposite of strong in the physical sense, which is the sense this sentence sets up.
Key facts
- Weak is the standard antonym of strong in the sense of physical power.
- Mighty means having or showing great strength or power.
- Rugged means sturdily built, or of terrain, rough and uneven.
- Complicated describes something made of many interrelated parts and hard to understand.
Study next
Common traps
- Reading the sentence as being about the box being awkward and choosing complicated
- Picking mighty or rugged, both of which are near-synonyms of the underlined word
A common word is underlined in a sentence and one true opposite is offered among near-synonyms. The bare-word version of the same task is at English Q.3 and Q.9 of this paper.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.