Question
If 'relftaga' means carefree, 'otaga' means careful and 'fertaga' means careless, which of the following could mean 'aftercare'?
Official answer and solution
- Official answer
- C
- From
- Official GATE 2016 answer key
Solution
Deconstruct the artificial language words into morphemes to deduce the word for 'aftercare'.
Compare the given words and meanings:
- 'relftaga' = carefree
- 'otaga' = careful
- 'fertaga' = careless
All three words share the component 'taga', and all three English meanings share the root concept 'care'. Therefore, 'taga' means 'care'.
The prefixes modify the root:
- 'relf-' = 'free'
- 'o-' = 'ful'
- 'fer-' = 'less'
In these words, the modifier appears first and 'taga' appears second for 'care-free', 'care-ful', and 'care-less'.
Now examine 'aftercare': 'after' is a new modifier that has not appeared previously, so it must correspond to an unused morpheme such as 'zen'. Placing the modifier with the root 'taga' yields 'tagazen'.
Thus, 'tagazen' represents 'aftercare'.
C
Selecting 'tagafer', which uses 'fer' (meaning 'less') instead of a new morpheme for 'after'.
The answer is the one in the official GATE answer key. The solution is this site's own explanation.
Source
- Paper
- GATE 2016 Computer Science and Information Technology (CS) Session 1
- Question
- 4 of 65, printed as GA Q.4
- Section
- General Aptitude
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