Select the most appropriate synonym of the given word. Labour

Correct — B. The word is given bare, with no sentence, so first fix which sense of labour is in play. Its core sense is hard, prolonged, wearying work.

Toil is that sense exactly: sustained effort that tires you out.

The two also match in part of speech, working as both noun and verb — you can labour at something or toil at it — so the swap holds whichever way the word is used → option (b).

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  Relaxation — Relaxation is the opposite pole: rest, and the easing of effort. Synonym items reliably plant the antonym, because the mind stores work and rest as a pair.
• (c)
  Dalliance — Dalliance means a brief, casual romantic involvement, or dawdling and trifling with time. It describes the absence of serious work, not work itself.
• (d)
  Mesh — Mesh is a net of interlaced strands, or the act of interlocking. It has no sense of effort at all and is here only for its blunt one-syllable look.

Labour carries at least three common senses: hard work, the body of workers, and childbirth. A bare-word synonym item expects the first and commonest sense unless the options force another.

Check the options against each sense in turn. Nothing here matches workers, and nothing matches childbirth, so hard work is the sense being tested.

Then match part of speech as well as meaning. Toil and labour are both noun and verb, so the pair is exact rather than approximate.

Key facts

• Toil means long, hard, tiring work, and functions as both noun and verb.
• Dalliance means a brief casual romantic involvement, or the wasting of time.
• Mesh is net-like material of interlaced strands, or the act of interlocking.

Common traps

• Reaching for Relaxation because labour and rest are stored together in memory.
• Reading Labour as the workforce or as childbirth, senses no option here fits.
• Guessing Dalliance from its Latinate look rather than from its meaning.

No directly related past PYQ was found.