Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
When India’s first satellite went up in 1975, it was named Aryabhata, and the choice is usually explained with a list: the value of pi, the turning Earth, the eclipses. Lists of firsts flatter a nation. They also miss what is most unusual about the man. What he left behind is less a set of answers than a habit of asking how the sky actually works.
Take the stars. Anyone who watches them for an hour sees them wheel from east to west, and the obvious reading, for most of history, was that the heavens turn around a still Earth. Aryabhata, working near Kusumapura, close to old Pataliputra, proposed the reverse. The Earth spins on its axis, he said, and the stars only seem to move, much as the bank of a river seems to slip backwards to someone in a moving boat. It was a heterodox claim. The ground under our feet gives no hint of motion, and many astronomers after him would not accept it.
His account of eclipses has the same flavour. The popular story blamed Rahu and Ketu, who were said to swallow the Sun and the Moon. Aryabhata put it down to shadows: the Earth’s shadow falling on the Moon, or the Moon blocking the Sun. A shadow can be predicted. A demon cannot.
Even his best-known number carries a quiet lesson. His rule for the circle gives pi as 3.1416, and he calls the result approximate. It is a small word, and a conspicuously honest one, from a writer who was, by his own account, twenty-three in 499 CE, the year usually given for the Aryabhatiya, an age at which most of us are still copying other people’s figures into notebooks.
The writer’s remark that “a shadow can be predicted” suggests that:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → an account based on shadows is stronger because its forecasts can be checked
The writer sets two short sentences side by side: “A shadow can be predicted. A demon cannot.”
- If eclipses come from shadows, one can work out when the next one will happen. Then the sky shows whether the forecast was right.
- Nobody can say when a demon will next swallow the Sun. So the old story cannot be tested. The writer prefers the explanation that can be checked.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: Aryabhata was the first person in history to forecast an eclipse correctly — Incorrect. Overstated: The passage says only that a shadow can be predicted. It says nothing about who first forecast an eclipse.
Option 2: people of Aryabhata’s time had already stopped believing in Rahu and Ketu — Incorrect. Contradicted: The passage calls Rahu and Ketu “the popular story”. Many people still believed it.
Option 3: the story of Rahu and Ketu was useful because it explained why eclipses frighten people — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The passage says nothing about fear or about any use of the old story.