Question:medium

Choose the one-word substitute for the given phrase.
Person who suffers from delusions of greatness.

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Break the word into its roots: "megalo" means great or large, and this word describes an obsession with one's own greatness.
Updated On: Jul 20, 2026
  • Megalomaniac
  • Kleptomaniac
  • Romantic
  • Hypochondriac
  • Ascetic
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The Correct Option is A

Solution and Explanation

Try approaching this through word roots. All five options end in either "-maniac" or describe a personality type, so look at what each one is obsessed with or defined by. "Kleptomaniac" is fixated on stealing. "Hypochondriac" is fixated on imagined illness. "Romantic" is defined by idealism or sentiment, and "ascetic" is defined by austerity and self-denial. The prefix "megalo-" means large or great, so "megalomaniac" is the person fixated on their own greatness or power, which is exactly the delusion described in the question. Hence the answer is "megalomaniac", option (a), answer 1.
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Although cynics may like to see the government’s policy for women in terms of the party’s internal power struggles, it will nevertheless be churlish to deny that it represents a pioneering effort aimed at bringing about sweeping social reforms. In its language, scope and strategies, the policy document displays a degree of understanding of women’s needs that is uncommon in government pronouncements. This is due in large part to the participatory process that marked its formulation, seeking the active involvement right from the start of women’s groups, academic institutions and non-government organizations with grass roots experience.
The result is not just a lofty declaration of principles but a blueprint for a practical programme of action. The policy delineates a series of concrete measures to accord women a decision-making role in the political domain and greater control over their economic status. Of especially far-reaching impact are the devolution of control of economic infrastructure to women, notably at the gram panchayat level, and the amendments proposed in the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 to give women coparcenary rights.
 An enlightened aspect of the policy is its recognition that actual change in the status of women cannot be brought about by the mere enactment of socially progressive legislation. Accordingly, it focuses on reorienting development programmes and sensitizing administrations to address specific situations as, for instance, the growing number of households headed by women, which is a consequence of rural-urban migration. The proposal to create an equal-opportunity police force and give women greater control of police stations is an acknowledgement of the biases and callousness displayed by the generally all-male lawenforcement authorities in cases of dowry and domestic violence. While the mere enunciation of such a policy has the salutary effect of sensitizing the administration as a whole, it does not make the task of its implementation any easier. 
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  • IBSAT
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I am the family face; flesh perishes. I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.
So wrote Thomas Hardy in his poem, Heredity, describing direct descent of life from one generation to the next. Indeed, the poem reflects the DNA in our genome. Dr.Drew Endy of MIT quoted this when he described how people at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) bypass nature’s constraint of direct descent. Scientists there have used chemistry and biochemistry to produce the first synthetic genome in the laboratory. They chemically synthesized many fragments of the DNA, encoding the 582,970-units-long genome of a bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium. Next, they assembled these fragments in perfect order to generate the genome of the bacterium.
The DNA sequence of the synthetic one was confirmed to be identical to the natural one. While the DNA pieces were synthesized chemically, the stitching together was done using the biochemical machinery of a host cell. About 100 pieces of the genome, each 5000-7000 units long in DNA sequence, were first joined to produce 25 sub-assemblies, each about 24000 base pairs long. These were then introduced into the bacterium E. coli to produce sufficient DNA for the next steps. Next, they repeated the procedure to generate large fragments comprising l/4th of the whole genome of M.genitalium.
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This surely raises ethical questions, a matter that JCVI is keenly aware of and is already engaged in with ethicists. Even their present work on M.genitalium was done with prior approval of ethical experts. But then, today it is M.genitalium, tomorrow it could be a more advanced, multi-cellular organism, and that could flummox even the ethicist. Assisted reproduction, which is the other side of the coin and truly a recently initiated technology, has become ethically and morally acceptable. Cloning of Dolly, the sheep, has not raised any outrage, but cloning a human certainly does.
  • IBSAT
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