Comprehension:
If the system hadn’t stalled, Antar would never have guessed that the scrap of paper on his screen was the remnant of an ID card. It looked as though it had been rescued from a fire: the plastic laminate was warped and melted along the edge. The lettering was mostly illegible, and the photograph had vanished under a smudge of soot. But a four-inch metal chain had somehow stayed attached to the card: it hung down in a rusty loop from a perforation in the top left-hand corner, like a drooping tail. It was the chain that triggered the system, not the card.
The card turned up in one of those routine inventories that went flashing around the globe with metronome regularity, for no reason that Antar could understand, except that it was what the system did best. Once it got started, it would keep them coming, hour after hour, an endless succession of documents and objects, stopping only when it stumbled on something it couldn’t file: the most trivial things usually. Once it was a glass paperweight, of the kind that rain snowflakes if you turn them upside down; another time it was a bottle of correcting fluid, from an irrigation overseer’s office just south of the Arab Sea. Both times the machine went into a controlled frenzy, firing off questions, one after another.
Antar had met children who were like that: What? Why? When? Where? How? But the children asked because they were curious. With these AVA/IIe systems it was something else - something he could only think of as a simulated urge for self-improvement. He’d been using Ava for a couple of years now, and he was still awed by her eagerness to become herself. Anything she did not recognise, she’d take apart on screen, producing ever greater refinements of details.
Which feature of the ruined ID card stalled Ava’s system?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → The chain that hung from a perforated loop
The passage states: "It was the chain that triggered the system, not the card." The four-inch metal chain that hung from a perforation in the corner of the card is what stalled Ava.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: The illegible lettering — Incorrect. Wrong cause: "the lettering was mostly illegible", but this was part of the damage to the card; the passage names the chain, not the card, as the trigger.
Option 3: The plastic laminate that had warped and melted along the edges — Incorrect. Wrong cause: the laminate "was warped and melted along the edge"; this shows the card had been in a fire; it is not what triggered the system.
Option 4: The photograph that had suspiciously vanished under a smudge of soot — Incorrect. Wrong cause: "the photograph had vanished under a smudge of soot"; the passage does not say "suspiciously", and the trigger was the chain.