SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 12 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 meaning of the underlined idiom. Anand personally believes in the motto, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

(a)Earn the maximum out of business
(b)Nourish health
(c)Enjoy the most when the season is favourable
(d)Make the best out of difficult situations

Answer

Why

Correct — D. In the proverb When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, the lemons stand for what is sour and unwanted and the lemonade for what you can make of it.

The clause when life gives you frames the setback as something already handed to you, and make is the part the speaker controls.

So the motto tells you to turn bad circumstances to good use, which is what option (d) says: make the best out of difficult situations.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Earn the maximum out of business — Business and profit appear nowhere in the proverb. Making the most of a setback may help at work, but the idiom is about circumstances in general, not earnings.
(b)
Nourish health — Nourish health takes the lemons literally, as fruit. In the idiom a lemon is the figure for something defective or disappointing, not a source of vitamin C.
(c)
Enjoy the most when the season is favourable — This reverses the condition. The proverb applies precisely when the season is unfavourable — the lemons are the bad luck, and the advice begins there.

Concept

An idiom is asked for its figurative sense, so the first move is to work out what the concrete image stands for.

A lemon in English idiom is something faulty or disappointing — a car that keeps breaking down is called a lemon. Lemonade is what a person deliberately makes from it, by adding effort.

The pairing gives an optimistic instruction: adversity is the input, and a good outcome is available to anyone who acts on it. Options that read the fruit literally, or that move the setting to business or to good times, miss the figure entirely.

The paper prints the proverb inside quotation marks as a motto, so no part of it is being completed — the whole saying is given and only its meaning is in question.

Key facts

The proverb means to make something good out of an unfavourable situation.
In English idiom a lemon is something defective or unsatisfactory.
Every cloud has a silver lining carries the same optimism about a bad situation.

Study next

Idioms of adversity and optimism: every cloud has a silver lining, a blessing in disguiseIdioms built on food images: a piece of cake, spill the beans, bring home the baconIdiom-completion items, as at English Q.5 of this paper (hold out the olive branch)

Common traps

Reading the fruit literally and choosing the health option
Choosing the favourable-season option, which inverts the condition the proverb starts from

The idiom item asks either for the meaning, as here, or for the idiom that fills a blank. English Q.5 of this paper does the second, with a sentence about a quarrel ending over tea.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.