SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 17 September 2024, Shift 1 · English Comprehension · Question 12 of 98

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 ANTONYM of the given word. Entire

(a)Ingress
(b)Incomplete
(c)Undivided
(d)Thorough

Answer

Why

Correct — B. Entire means whole, with no part left out, so its opposite has to name a lack.

Incomplete does precisely that: missing a part, unfinished.

Sort the four words into 'same side' and 'opposite side' and only option (b) lands on the opposite side. Undivided and thorough sit on entire's own side, and ingress is not on the scale at all.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Ingress — Ingress means the act of entering, or a way in, and its opposite is egress. The 'in-' here marks direction, not negation, so the word never touches wholeness.
(c)
Undivided — Undivided means whole and unsplit — a synonym of entire, placed here for the candidate who answers the question the stem did not ask.
(d)
Thorough — Thorough means complete in every respect. Same side of the meaning as entire, not the reverse of it.

Concept

An SSC antonym item is usually built by stacking near-synonyms of the stem word around one true opposite.

That makes the fast method a sorting method: label each option 'same', 'opposite' or 'unrelated' instead of reasoning about each one in turn.

Here undivided and thorough are 'same', ingress is 'unrelated', and incomplete names the absence that entire denies. The capitalised ANTONYM in the stem is the paper's own warning about the trap.

'Entire' also means undivided in the sense of attention — 'my entire attention' — which is why undivided reads so plausibly. The overlap is real, and that is exactly why it is in the option list.

Key facts

Entire means whole, with nothing left out.
Incomplete means lacking a part, or unfinished.
Ingress means the act of entering, and its opposite is egress.

Study next

Antonym items assembled from stacked synonymsNegating prefixes (in-, un-, dis-) against prefixes of direction (in-, im-)Paired opposites: ingress and egress, ascent and descent

Common traps

Answering with the synonym because the capitalised ANTONYM was read too quickly.
Reading the 'in-' of ingress as a negative prefix.

Opposites are asked as a bare word, as here, and as a word underlined inside a sentence.

English Q.20 of this paper runs the sentence form, asking for the word opposite in meaning to 'discouraged'.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.