Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
On an overnight train to Madurai, the woman in the berth opposite mine wrote for almost an hour by the light of a small torch. Her notebook was fat and cloth-covered. She wrote slowly, now and then striking out a line. For five years I have helped build a note-taking app, so I watched her more closely than was polite.
When I asked, she said she had tried keeping a diary on her phone and given up. On the phone she kept deleting things. On paper a cancelled line is still there, so her second thoughts stay in plain sight. Months later she can look back and see how her mind moved, line by line. I think she has a point that people in my line of work rarely admit. An app is built to make writing smooth. It fixes spellings and saves the neat final version. A diary is not meant to be neat. It is meant to catch you before you have tidied yourself up. Her notebook also has no audience. It sends no reminders and waits for no likes.
None of this makes paper safer. A notebook can be left on a train or soaked in a leaking bag, and anyone can read it. Mine would be locked with a password and copied to the cloud. You also cannot search a stack of old notebooks for the day you first met someone. She agreed about the searching. About the rest she only shrugged and went back to her page, the torch held in her teeth.
The phrase ‘her second thoughts stay in plain sight’, as used in the passage, means that
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 1
The correct answer is Option (1) → the earlier words she has corrected remain readable on the page
Second thoughts are changes you make after thinking again. In plain sight means where anyone can see it.
- The sentence begins: “On paper a cancelled line is still there”. On the phone she just deleted things.
- So when she changes what she wrote, the old words can still be read. Her changes of mind show on the page. Example: I wrote “yes” on the form, but on second thoughts I changed it to “no”.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 2: her doubts about keeping a diary at all remain clear to anyone watching — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: “Second thoughts” can mean doubts about doing something. But here the phrase follows the cancelled line, so it means the changes she makes in her writing.
Option 3: the extra ideas she adds later remain neatly written in the margins — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The passage speaks of lines she strikes out. It says nothing about notes in the margins.
Option 4: the private feelings she writes down remain open to other readers — Incorrect. Misread: “In plain sight” here means visible on her own page. The writer says her notebook “has no audience”.