SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 17 September 2024, Shift 3 · 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 underlined word in the given sentence. The patient was suffering from a chronic disease.

(a)Mild
(b)Usual
(c)Universal
(d)Common

Answer

Why

Correct — A. Chronic describes an illness that persists over a long period and keeps returning, and by extension one that is settled and serious rather than passing.

An antonym has to reverse that. Mild does: a mild illness is slight, gentle and easily borne.

Option (a) answers the same question 'chronic' answers — how severe, how lasting. The other three answer how widely or how often a disease occurs, which is a different scale.

Why the others are wrong

(b)
Usual — Usual means customary or expected, and is opposed by 'unusual'. Frequency is a different axis from the severity and duration that chronic measures.
(c)
Universal — Universal means found everywhere or applying to everyone, and is opposed by 'local'. It says nothing about how long or how badly an illness runs.
(d)
Common — Common means widespread, so its antonym is 'rare'. A chronic disease can also be a common one, which is proof the two are not opposites.

Concept

Chronic comes from Greek chronos, time, so duration is built into the word. In medicine a chronic condition is one lasting months or years, as against an acute condition, which is sudden, sharp and short.

Everyday English then borrowed it for anything persistent and bad: a chronic shortage, a chronic complainer. Antonym items usually lean on that everyday sense, so the answer swings on severity as much as on time.

The strict medical antonym of chronic is 'acute', and it is not on the list. With the four words the paper actually prints, the contrast that survives is severity, and 'mild' is the word for the slight end of that scale.

Key facts

Chronic is from Greek chronos, time, and describes a condition persisting over a long period.
In medicine the pair is chronic and acute: long and persistent against sudden and short.
In general use chronic also means persistently bad, as in a chronic shortage.
Mild means slight in degree and gentle in effect.

Study next

Medical word pairs worth holding: chronic and acute, benign and malignantAntonyms that turn on degree rather than direction: mild, moderate, severeWords whose everyday sense has drifted from the technical one: chronic, critical, terminal

Common traps

Reaching for 'acute' from memory and then picking the nearest-looking word when it is absent.
Reading chronic as 'common' because chronic illnesses are widespread.
Judging the option against the bare word and ignoring the sentence, which fixes the medical sense.

SSC asks the antonym both as a bare word and as a word planted in a sentence. The sentence form returns at English Q.3 and Q.9 here, on 'predictable' and 'abolish'.

It runs the same way across dates: 'inquisitive' at 9 Sep 2024, 12:30, English Q.7 is keyed to 'Disinterested'.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.