English · Exam Skills and Methodology

Lexical exploration — synonyms & antonyms in context

Spot the word that means the same, or the exact opposite, inside the text

  • Foreign languages essential
  • Literature and philosophy essential
  • Experimental sciences essential
  • Mathematics essential
  • Engineering essential
  • Management and economics essential

6 minutes

The academic content is in Arabic, as at the BAC and as in the app.

What the syllabus expects from you

  • Finding a word/phrase in the text closest in meaning to a given word (synonym)
  • Finding a word/phrase opposite in meaning to a given word (antonym)

The method

  1. Search the same paragraph first — the exam always draws the pair from a nearby sentence

The common mistakes

  • Answering with a word from outside the given paragraph
  • Confusing near-synonym with exact antonym

The kind of exercise that comes up at the BAC

  • Synonym/antonym block easy

    3 target words → find synonym/antonym in the text

From the lesson

Read about Mr. Amrani. Different people describe him with different words, but they are all pointing at the same idea.

The vocabulary

  • synonym (مرادف)
  • antonym (متضاد)
  • closest in meaning (الأقرب معنى)