SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 17 September 2024, Shift 2 · English Comprehension · Question 14 of 100

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 word in the brackets to fill in the blank. The chef requires ______ vegetables for the salad. [stale]

(a)green
(b)cut
(c)leafy
(d)fresh

Answer

Why

Correct — D. The bracketed word is stale, and stale, of food, means no longer fresh — dried out, gone off, past its best.

Its direct opposite is fresh, and the sentence agrees with the dictionary: a chef making a salad wants fresh vegetables.

Read what the instruction asks for. It does not ask for a word that fits the blank — three of these do — but for the antonym of the bracketed word, and that is option (d).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
green — Green is a colour, and colour is not the quality stale measures. A vegetable can be green and stale at the same moment, so green reverses nothing.
(b)
cut — Cut describes preparation, not condition. Its own opposite is whole or uncut, and cut vegetables go stale like any others.
(c)
leafy — Leafy classifies the kind of vegetable. Spinach is leafy on the day it is picked and leafy three days later, so it says nothing about freshness.

Concept

In a bracketed-antonym item the sentence is scenery and the bracket is the question. Your job is to reverse the bracketed word in the sense the sentence gives it.

Stale carries that sense for food: bread, vegetables and air all go stale, and all of them are restored to the opposite state by the word fresh.

The trap is built into the option list. Green, cut and leafy are all perfectly natural before "vegetables", so a candidate reading for fluency rather than for opposition can pick any of them and feel satisfied.

Note that the three wrong options are not near-antonyms of stale at all — they are near-neighbours of "vegetables". SSC builds the distraction around the noun in the blank rather than around the word in the bracket, which is precisely why re-reading the instruction pays.

Key facts

Stale means no longer fresh, used of food, bread and air.
Fresh is the standard antonym of stale in all of those senses.
In this format the word to be reversed is the one in brackets, not the noun beside the blank.

Study next

Antonyms that shift with sense, such as light against heavy and light against darkAdjective pairs for food and condition (raw and cooked, ripe and unripe, tender and tough)Reading the bracket before the sentence in antonym-in-blank items

Common traps

Choosing the option that fits the sentence most comfortably instead of the one that reverses the bracket.
Reversing the noun in the blank rather than the bracketed word.
Assuming a colour word is a condition word.

The bracketed format hands you the word to reverse and a sentence that must stay sensible. 13 Sep 2024, 12:30, English Q.15 asks the opposite of [hit] and keys "missed", and 13 Sep 2024, 16:00, English Q.9 asks the opposite of [sell] and keys "buy".

Bare antonyms with no sentence at all are at English Q.5 (Synthetic) and Q.8 (Attack) of this paper.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.