SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 18 September 2024, Shift 1 · English Comprehension · Question 5 of 99

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 option that can substitute the idiom in the given brackets. His PhD degree seems to be (Penelope’s web).

(a)An endless task
(b)A difficult task
(c)An important task
(d)A secret task

Answer

Why

Correct — A. Penelope's web comes from Homer's Odyssey. Penelope told her suitors she would remarry once she had finished weaving a shroud, then unpicked at night what she had woven by day.

The weaving therefore never ended, and the idiom names work that is undone as fast as it is done — an endless task.

Read that back into the sentence and it says the PhD is going on and on with no finish in sight, which is what option (a) states.

Why the others are wrong

(b)
A difficult task — The weaving was not difficult — Penelope could do it easily enough. What defeated it was her own unpicking, so the idiom names endlessness and not difficulty.
(c)
An important task — Importance is no part of the story. The weaving mattered to Penelope only as a delaying device, so the idiom carries no sense of high stakes.
(d)
A secret task — The unpicking was indeed done in secret, which makes this the closest miss. The idiom names what the secrecy produced, work with no end, rather than the secrecy itself.

Concept

A small group of English idioms are classical allusions: the meaning sits in a story, not in the words. Penelope's web is one of them, and no amount of thinking about webs will get you there.

Because the story is fixed, the meaning is fixed. Penelope weaves by day and unweaves by night to put off the suitors until Odysseus returns, so her web is work that can never be finished.

Modern use follows the story exactly: a Penelope's web is a task without end.

The idiom also carries a shade of deliberate delay, since stalling was Penelope's purpose.

None of the four options offers that shade, so endlessness is what this item is asking you for.

Key facts

Penelope is the wife of Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey.
She promised to choose a suitor once she had finished weaving a shroud for Laertes, and secretly unravelled her work each night.
Penelope's web means a task that is never finished.

Study next

Classical-allusion idioms: Achilles' heel, Herculean task, Pandora's boxIdioms about futile effort such as a wild goose chase and flogging a dead horseReading the sentence around a bracketed idiom to confirm the sense you have chosen

Common traps

Choosing a difficult task because a PhD is hard, when the sentence's complaint is about length and not about difficulty.
Trying to decode web literally as something tangled or trapping.

Idiom meaning is also tested by describing a situation and asking for the idiom that fits, as at 18 Sep 2024, 09:00, English Q.7, and by asking the meaning outright, as at 11 Sep 2024, 16:00, English Q.17 (Nobody's fool).

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.