Select the most appropriate meaning of the given word. Edible

Correct — D. Edible means fit to be eaten, so the answer must sit on the food side of the four options.

noxious (harmful), noisome (foul-smelling) and mortal (deadly) all point the other way — each describes something you should not put in your mouth.

nutritive means nourishing, or relating to nourishment, and is the only option compatible with eating. That is why option (d) is marked.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  noxious — noxious means harmful or poisonous, from Latin noxa, harm. A noxious substance is the opposite of edible — it is precisely what must not be eaten.
• (b)
  noisome — noisome means offensively smelly or disgusting. It has nothing to do with noise, and that resemblance is the whole reason it is on the list.
• (c)
  mortal — mortal means subject to death, or deadly, as in a mortal wound. It describes fatality, not fitness for eating.

A meaning-of-the-word item is settled by direction before it is settled by precision.

Sort the options into positive and negative first. Three here are negative — harmful, foul, deadly — and edible is a positive word, so the field halves in one step.

Then check the domain. nutritive belongs to food and nourishment, which is the domain edible names. Latin roots do most of this work: edere, to eat, gives edible, inedible and edacious.

Key facts

• Edible means fit to be eaten, from Latin edere, to eat.
• noisome means foul-smelling and is unrelated to noise, sharing a root with annoy.
• The Latin root nocere, to harm, lies behind noxious, obnoxious and innocuous.

Common traps

• Reading noisome as noisy, which makes it look neutral instead of negative.
• Rejecting nutritive because it is not an exact synonym, when the stem asks only for the most appropriate of four.
• Hunting for a perfect definition when three options fall on direction alone.

No directly related past PYQ was found.