Select the most appropriate ANTONYM of the word in the brackets to fill in the blank. Akash went to ______ his school uniform. [sell]

Correct — D. The bracketed word is the one to reverse, not the one to insert. The blank takes the antonym of sell.

To sell is to hand goods over in return for money. To buy is to take them in return for money — the same transaction seen from the other side.

Akash went to buy his school uniform reads naturally and reverses the bracketed word exactly → option (d).

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  make — make is to produce the uniform. Producing and selling are different acts, so make is simply unrelated to sell rather than opposite to it.
• (b)
  rent — rent transfers the use of something for a period without transferring ownership. That is a third kind of transaction, not the reverse of a sale.
• (c)
  loan — To loan is to lend and to expect the thing back. It sits on the giver's side, as selling does, while the antonym of sell has to name the receiver's side.

buy and sell are converse antonyms: one event described from the two participants' points of view. If Akash buys the uniform from the shop, the shop sells it to him, and both sentences report the same fact.

lend and borrow work the same way, as do teach and learn, and give and take.

That is a different relation from gradable antonyms such as hot and cold, which admit degrees and a middle ground, and from complementary ones such as alive and dead, where denying one asserts the other. Knowing which kind you are facing tells you what the opposite has to do.

Key facts

• buy and sell are converse antonyms: one transaction described from the buyer's side and from the seller's side.
• lend and borrow form the same kind of pair, as do teach and learn.
• Gradable antonyms such as hot and cold admit degrees, which converse pairs do not.
• In this item format the answer is the opposite of the bracketed word, and the bracketed word itself is never an option to be copied into the blank.

Common traps

• Filling the blank with a synonym of the bracketed word instead of its opposite
• Choosing rent or loan because both belong to the vocabulary of transactions
• Judging by which word sounds best in the sentence without checking it against the bracket

No directly related past PYQ was found.