SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 13 September 2024, Shift 2 · 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 10 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 word in the brackets to fill in the blank. She ________ the target by an inch and lost the gold medal. [hit]

(a)cleaned
(b)missed
(c)bashed
(d)touched

Answer

Why

Correct — B. The bracketed word is hit, so the blank needs its opposite, and the rest of the sentence tells you which one.

She lost the gold medal, so the attempt failed. missed is the direct opposite of 'hit' when the object is a target.

by an inch gives only the margin — English uses it for a narrow win as readily as a narrow miss — so it settles nothing.

'She missed the target by an inch and lost the gold medal' reads as one connected thought. That is option (b).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
cleaned — cleaned is not a shooting or archery verb. 'Cleaned the target by an inch' is not English, and nothing in it explains losing the medal.
(c)
bashed — bashed means struck violently — a synonym of hit, not its antonym. It also leaves 'by an inch' with nothing to measure.
(d)
touched — touched entails contact, so it sits on the hit side of the pair. If she touched the target, she did not miss it by an inch.

Concept

The bracketed word gives you the meaning to reverse; the sentence decides between candidates that all look plausible.

One signal fixes this one: lost the gold medal tells you the attempt failed. by an inch states only the size of the margin, and fits a narrow win as comfortably as a narrow miss.

Collocation is the quiet half of an antonym item. Several options can be defended on meaning alone, and the one that survives is the phrase a competent speaker would actually say.

The bracketed word is printed after the sentence here, as [hit], rather than beside the blank. The instruction is otherwise identical to the in-sentence version.

Key facts

Miss is the standard antonym of hit when the object is a target.
by an inch and by a mile state a margin and are neutral about the outcome: you can win by an inch or miss by an inch.
Bash and touch both entail contact, which is why neither can be the opposite of hit.

Study next

Margin collocations and what they do not tell you: by an inch, by a whisker, by a hair's breadthVerbs of contact graded by force: touch, tap, strike, bashUsing the second clause of a sentence to choose between two defensible antonyms

Common traps

Reversing the bracketed word without reading past 'and'. lost the gold medal is the confirmation the item hands you free.
Choosing touched as a weaker hit. An antonym must cross the line, not sit nearer to it.
Trying to settle it from by an inch alone, when the margin fits either outcome and lost the gold medal is what fixes the direction.

SSC prints the word to be reversed in square brackets after the sentence and leaves the blank inside it. Also asked 13 Sep 2024, 16:00, English Q.9 (sell becomes buy) and 17 Sep 2024, 12:30, English Q.14, which keys 'fresh'.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.