Introduction
Vocabulary is the single most heavily-tested area of the English section in Bangladeshi government job exams (BCS Preliminary, Bank AD/Officer written and MCQ, and IT-officer posts). In almost every recruitment paper you will meet three closely-related question types:
- Synonyms — a word that has (nearly) the same meaning as a given word.
- Antonyms — a word that has the opposite meaning of a given word.
- One-word substitutions — a single word that replaces a whole phrase, clause or definition ("a person who eats human flesh" → cannibal).
These three account for a large, predictable and scoring block of marks. Unlike grammar (which needs rule application) or comprehension (which needs reasoning under time pressure), vocabulary is pure recall plus a few reasoning shortcuts. If you learn the words and, more importantly, the techniques to attack unknown words, you can convert this into near-full marks. This lesson gives you both: a system for building word-power (roots, prefixes, suffixes, context) and repeatable elimination techniques for the exam hall.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
- Define synonym, antonym, and one-word substitution precisely and distinguish them.
- Use word roots, prefixes and suffixes (etymology) to decode the meaning of an unseen word.
- Apply context, connotation and part-of-speech matching to pick the best option.
- Recognise the traps set by examiners: near-synonyms, homonyms, shades of meaning, and degree of formality.
- Master a curated bank of high-frequency exam words (synonyms, antonyms) and standard one-word substitutions.
- Answer any MCQ in this area using a 4-step elimination strategy.