SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 9 September 2024, Shift 1 · English Comprehension · Question 18 of 100

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 meaning of the given idiom. To have bigger fish to fry

(a)To have bigger things to take care of than the menial task at hand
(b)To take calculated risks
(c)To know different kinds of fishing techniques
(d)To have an interest in cooking

Answer

Why

Correct — A. The idiom is fixed and figurative — the fish is not a fish.

To have bigger fish to fry means to have more important matters demanding your attention, so the small job in front of you can wait.

Option (a) says exactly that: bigger things to take care of than the menial task at hand. Two of the others simply read fish and fry literally, and the third defines a wholly different phrase.

Why the others are wrong

(b)
To take calculated risks — Risk appears nowhere in the idiom. Having bigger fish to fry is about competing priorities, not about weighing danger against reward, so this defines a different phrase altogether.
(c)
To know different kinds of fishing techniques — This reads fish and fry literally. An idiom is not assembled from its words, and no fishing technique is implied by having something more important to do.
(d)
To have an interest in cooking — Cooking is the surface image, not the sense. Fry is only the picture the idiom is built on; the phrase waves a small task aside and says nothing about what the speaker likes doing.

Concept

An idiom is non-compositional: its meaning is not the sum of its words. That is why translating the picture — fish, frying — gets you nowhere.

Bigger fish to fry encodes a comparison. There is a task in front of you and something more important elsewhere, and the idiom is the polite way of saying the first one is beneath your time.

You will usually meet it as a reason for refusing or postponing something small — he did not stay for the meeting, he had bigger fish to fry.

Note the comparative bigger. A common variant, to have other fish to fry, carries the same sense without the size comparison. SSC keys the meaning rather than the variant, so scan the options for the one that mentions competing priorities.

Key facts

To have bigger fish to fry means to have more important things to attend to than the task at hand.
The idiom is non-literal, so nothing in the answer should turn on fish or on frying.
A common variant is to have other fish to fry, with the same meaning.

Study next

Common food idioms: a piece of cake, in a pickle, spill the beans, bring home the baconIdioms about setting a small task aside: put something on the back burner, first things firstIdiom items where one option is simply the literal reading of the words

Common traps

Choosing the option that keeps the literal image of fishing or cooking
Reading bigger as a comment on difficulty rather than on importance
Deciding on the first option that mentions something plausible instead of reading all four

SSC gives the idiom bare, with no sentence around it, and builds two of its wrong options out of the literal words — fishing at option (c), cooking at option (d).

The same shift tests an idiomatic collocation at English Q.15 (09 Sep 2024, 09:00) — a narrow escape — and embeds another, watch our step, in the sentence at English Q.17.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.