Select the most appropriate synonym of the underlined word. We went to a legitimate Mexican restaurant for my birthday, where they served cuisine like you would find in Mexico.

Correct — B. Legitimate has two senses — lawful, and real rather than fake — and the sentence fixes the second.

The clause after it is the test: where they served cuisine like you would find in Mexico. That praises the food for being the real thing, not the restaurant for holding a licence.

Genuine carries exactly that sense of authenticity, so it substitutes without shifting the meaning. Option (b) keys it.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  productive — Productive describes output — a productive meeting, a productive field. A restaurant can be productive and still serve invented food, so the word says nothing about whether the cuisine is authentic.
• (c)
  fictitious — Fictitious means made up, existing only in the imagination. That is the reverse of what the sentence praises, and the restaurant plainly exists — the speaker went there for a birthday.
• (d)
  falsified — Falsified means altered in order to deceive, as with falsified records. It needs something tampered with — accounts, evidence, a document — and it too sits on the wrong side of the meaning.

Legitimate comes from Latin lex, legis, meaning law, and its oldest sense is lawful — a legitimate government, a legitimate claim.

Everyday English has widened it to mean genuine or valid of its kind: a legitimate concern, a legitimate business, a legitimate Mexican restaurant.

Which sense a synonym item wants is decided by the sentence around the word, never by the word alone. Here the reference to cuisine like you would find in Mexico rules out the legal sense — nobody is discussing licences.

Key facts

• Legitimate means lawful in its legal sense and genuine or authentic in its everyday sense.
• Genuine, authentic and bona fide substitute for that second sense.
• Fictitious and falsified are antonyms of that sense, not synonyms.

Common traps

• Reading legitimate only in its legal sense and hunting for lawful among the options
• Choosing an antonym because it belongs to the same area of meaning as the keyed word
• Deciding on the underlined word alone instead of the sentence it sits in

No directly related past PYQ was found.