Select the option that can be used as a one-word substitute for the underlined group of words. Foul smell will come if the food is not fresh.

Correct — D. The group of words being replaced is not fresh, and stale is the single adjective that carries exactly that sense: food past its best, dried out or beginning to smell.

Put it back in the sentence — 'Foul smell will come if the food is stale' — and the meaning survives untouched. That substitution is the whole test for a one-word substitute.

Stale is also the word English pairs with the consequence the sentence predicts: stale bread, stale air, a stale smell.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  brittle — brittle means hard and liable to snap — brittle bones, brittle toffee. Food can be brittle while perfectly fresh, so the word reports texture and says nothing about age.
• (b)
  crisp — crisp is a texture too, and a favourable one: firm, dry and fresh. It sits at the opposite end of the freshness scale from what the sentence needs.
• (c)
  odourless — odourless means giving off no smell at all, which flatly contradicts the 'foul smell' the sentence predicts. It is also a claim about smell, not about freshness.

A one-word substitute replaces a descriptive phrase with a single word that means the same thing in that slot. The check is mechanical: drop the option into the sentence and see whether the meaning is unchanged.

Vocabulary options are usually separated by what they measure. stale measures freshness over time. crisp and brittle measure texture. odourless measures smell.

Only an option on the same dimension as the phrase it replaces can substitute for it, which is why three of these fail before their exact shades matter.

Key facts

• Stale means no longer fresh, used of food, of air, and figuratively of news and jokes.
• Brittle describes something hard that breaks easily, not something old.
• Crisp describes firm, fresh texture, which places it opposite stale on the freshness scale.
• Odourless means giving off no smell, so it describes an absence rather than a state of decay.

Common traps

• Picking crisp because it also describes food. The sentence needs the state that produces a foul smell, and crisp is a fresh-food word.
• Reading odourless as 'bad-smelling' because odour sounds unpleasant. It means the absence of any smell.
• Choosing on how the option sounds instead of substituting it into the sentence, which settles the item in a second.

No directly related past PYQ was found.