SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 25 September 2024, Shift 2 · English Comprehension · Question 12 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 10 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 given word. Forgive

(a)Requite
(b)Clear
(c)Unburden
(d)Loathe

Answer

Why

Correct — D. Forgive means to stop feeling anger or resentment towards someone who has wronged you. Its opposite is not an action such as punishing, but the settled ill feeling that forgiveness dissolves.

Loathe is to feel intense dislike or hatred for someone. Pardon at one end of the attitude, detestation at the other → option (d).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Requite — Requite means to make a return in kind, for a favour as readily as for an injury. Repayment is not the opposite of pardoning.
(b)
Clear — To clear someone is to free them of blame or suspicion. That travels in the same direction as forgiving rather than against it.
(c)
Unburden — Unburden means to relieve of a load, or to confess what is weighing on you. Like forgiveness it releases rather than opposes.

Concept

An antonym item is decided on the core sense of the word, not on a loose association with it.

Forgive belongs to a family of attitude verbs — pardon, absolve, excuse, condone. The opposing family holds the verbs of sustained ill will: loathe, detest, abhor, resent.

The wrong options here are drawn from the emotional and legal neighbourhood of forgiveness — repaying, exonerating, relieving. Each shares a setting with the word while none reverses it, and that is how a four-option antonym set is usually built.

Requite is the option that costs marks, because requiting an injury can shade into avenging it. Its dictionary sense is neutral return, and a word that needs one particular phrase to look opposite is not the antonym.

Key facts

Forgive means to stop feeling anger or resentment towards an offender.
Loathe means to feel intense dislike or hatred, the settled opposite of that attitude.
Requite means to make an appropriate return for a favour or a wrong, so its core sense is repayment.

Study next

Attitude verbs and their opposites: forgive, condone and absolve against loathe, resent and abhorVerbs of return and retaliation: requite, reciprocate, avenge, retaliateTelling an antonym apart from a word that merely names a different action

Common traps

Reading clear as an opposite because a court either clears or convicts, when clearing is itself absolution
Choosing requite for the retaliation sense it carries only in a phrase such as requite an injury
Hunting for a word meaning punish, which names an action, when forgive names an attitude

SSC gives the bare word with no sentence, so the core dictionary sense is the only evidence available. This shift asks the same one-word antonym at English Q.4 (Nominal keys to Significant), Q.8 (Bombastic keys to Simple) and Q.20 (Concede keys to Deny).

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.