IPMAT Indore 2022 · Verbal Ability · Question 7

The idiom. To look on the bright side means to focus on the positive aspect of a difficult situation.

Why it fits. The structure is pure contrast: a hardship (“two more difficult exams”) set against a consolation (“after these I won’t have any more for a year”). Finding the consolation in a hardship is looking on the bright side.

Why the others fail. All three are corruptions of the fixed form:

(b) think upon the sunny side — wrong verb and wrong adjective; upon is archaic here.

(c) look forward to the bright side — grafts a second idiom (look forward to) onto this one. You look forward to an event, not to a perspective.

(d) think about the sunny side — wrong verb and wrong adjective again.

The idiom is look (not think) on (not upon/about) the bright (not sunny) side.

Answer: Option 1

Shortcut. Three of the four options change a word of a fixed phrase, which is the whole design. Fix the exact string in memory: look on the bright side.

Option (c) is worth studying because it blends two real idioms — a very common distractor technique. Look forward to takes a noun denoting an event (look forward to the holidays), so “look forward to the bright side” is a category error as well as a blend.

And note the sentence’s own signal: “but”. The contrast marker tells you the blank must introduce the positive counterweight, which confirms the meaning before you weigh the wordings.