what would be the difference between "rancid" and "stale"?

Question

I was taking a Cambridge English test online and I chose the answered rancid over stale and they marked it wrong. The sentence was...

Don't eat that bread it's ____
options were... rancid, stale, bad, hard

I chose rancid over stale but they marked it wrong. Why was that?

Answer 1

Bread goes stale, which is hard, dry, a bit off smelling and old. Rancid is a word you would use typically with bad meat, indicating that it was rotten, or smelled extremely bad.

Answer 2

you could easily look that up online.



but rancid suggests an introduction mixture of some other moist item to change the chemical makeup of bread while stale would just suggest all the moisture has left the bread.



pretty much all of those words would've been correct.

it's almost like having a fill in the blank for the weather, any one of them could've been right.



doesn't seem to be the most well thought out question. unless it came with an introductory paragraph or something.

Answer 3

"Stale" makes more sense as it implies a food past its prime that has either dried out and/or lost its characteristic flavor and/or texture. "Rancid" refers to the same condition (and actually refers to actual chemical breakdown) and is reserved for foods that contain oils/fats: the butter had turned rancid. Rancidity refers to the degree to which the food has turned bad; staleness would be its counterpart.

Answer 4

Stale can mean anything (especially food) that is not fresh, but is not rotten. Rancid means that something has gone rotten and has a horrible smell and can no longer be eaten. Rancid is a much more extreme word.

Answer 5

Rancid usually refers to oil.

Answer 6

Rancid is like meat. Bread gets stale when it starts to go bad, but it doesn't get crawling with diseases, which is what rancid sort of implies. Decaying meat is a death sentence. Stale bread is just old bread.