SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 13 September 2024, Shift 2 · English Comprehension · Question 3 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 synonym of the given word. Celebrate

(a)Assure
(b)Rejoice
(c)Daunt
(d)Bitch

Answer

Why

Correct — B. Celebrate carries two senses — to mark an occasion with festivity, and to feel and show happiness about something.

Rejoice means to feel or show great joy, which matches the second sense directly.

A synonym item asks for the nearest available word, not an identical one. The remaining three belong to other fields altogether — certainty, fear and complaint — so option (b) is the nearest by a wide margin.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Assure — Assure means to tell someone confidently that something is true, removing their doubt. It is a word about certainty, with no element of joy in it.
(c)
Daunt — Daunt means to make someone lose courage or feel intimidated. That is close to the opposite of the feeling celebrate names.
(d)
Bitch — Bitch as a verb is informal for complaining spitefully. Complaint sits at the far end from celebration.

Concept

Synonym items are decided by sense, not by how formal or how familiar a word looks. Ask what the given word means in its commonest use, then test each option against that meaning.

A working test: could the option replace the word in an ordinary sentence without changing what the sentence claims? Rejoice passes on the sense of gladness.

It also helps to notice the emotional direction. Celebrate is positive, and two of the options here are negative, which removes them before you weigh anything finer.

Celebrate has a formal religious sense too — a priest celebrates Mass — and a sense of praising publicly, as in a celebrated author. SSC keys the everyday sense of gladness here.

Key facts

Rejoice — to feel or show great joy. The noun form is rejoicing.
Daunt means to intimidate or dishearten, and survives most often in dauntless, meaning fearless.
Assure, ensure and insure are distinct — you assure a person, ensure an outcome and insure property.

Study next

Verbs of emotion and their antonym pairs, such as rejoice and lamentThe assure, ensure and insure trioSynonym items where the word is underlined inside a sentence

Common traps

Choosing the word that sounds most formal rather than the one that shares the meaning.
Reading celebrate only as throwing a party, and rejecting rejoice as too literary.

SSC asks synonyms both bare, as here, and inside a sentence. The in-sentence version runs at English Q.20 of this 13 Sep 2024, 12:30 paper, where leisure is keyed to Recreation, and the mirror-image antonym task runs at English Q.12 of the same paper, where happy is keyed to Sad.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.