Upper Primary School English Quiz - Vocabulary 02 - Antonyms 2 (Questions)

‘While my friend Sagarika is a FOOLISH girl, my other friend Ayesha is a SMART girl.’ - What do you gather from this sentence? Clearly you think that Sagarika is almost the exact opposite of Ayesha. The words in capitals are words which have opposite meanings to one another. Another word to describe the relationship between the two words is antonym.

Of course, in this description of the two girls you could say one could be more foolish or less foolish and similarly the other girl could be smarter or less smart. Such words, where there is a relationship that can be graded, are called graded antonyms. Examples of graded antonyms include empty/full, calm/tense and abundant/scanty. There are other types of antonyms that grace the English language. They are the relational antonyms and the complementary antonyms.

[readmore]Antonyms such as north/south, seller/buyer and slave/master are excellent examples of relational antonyms. Antonyms such as noisy/silent, wet/dry and artificial/natural are good examples of complementary antonyms. Besides these three kinds of antonyms there are other antonyms which are formed by adding prefixes to a word. Antonyms such as likely/unlikely, visible/invisible and obey/disobey are antonyms that are easily formed by adding one of the prefixes un-, in- or –dis.

Most words in the English language have several alternative words that can be used depending on the information to be conveyed. Antonyms give us the opportunity to choose our words carefully and to put forth our point of view forcefully.

In the earlier quizzes we have done exercises on the various types of antonyms. In this quiz we introduce you to many new antonyms which will help you to expand your vocabulary.