Select the most appropriate synonym of the word in bold. The city has immense coal piers.

Correct — C. Immense means extremely large in size or extent, from Latin "immensus", literally "unmeasured".

The sentence, "The city has immense coal piers", describes physical structures, so the adjective is doing plain size work with no figurative sense in play.

Huge carries exactly that meaning, and it substitutes into the sentence without changing anything: "The city has huge coal piers" → option (c).

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  diminutive — Diminutive means very small. It is the direct opposite of immense, and it is placed first to catch a candidate reading the list too quickly.
• (b)
  trifling — Trifling means unimportant or of little value. It grades significance rather than size, so it misses on both direction and axis.
• (d)
  set — Set means fixed or arranged. It carries no idea of magnitude and cannot describe how large a pier is.

Synonym items reward substitution rather than definition. Put the option back into the sentence and check that the sentence still says the same thing.

Immense sits in a family of size adjectives — large, huge, enormous, vast, colossal — that differ in force but not in direction. Every one of them means big.

The wrong options here run the opposite way (diminutive, trifling) or on a different axis altogether (set). Sorting by direction first cuts the field before nuance matters.

Key facts

• Immense means very large in size, degree or extent.
• It comes from Latin immensus, meaning unmeasured.
• Diminutive means very small and is an antonym of immense.
• Trifling means insignificant, a judgement of importance rather than of size.

Common traps

• Choosing diminutive because it looks like the more technical, exam-sounding word.
• Treating trifling as a size word when it actually grades importance.

No directly related past PYQ was found.