Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
Last winter a fever kept me in my hostel room for three days. My phone, propped against a water bottle, lit up every few minutes. There were thirty-odd groups on it: the class group, the batch group, a group for a trek that never happened, and one named only with a cricket-ball emoji. Between them they sent some four hundred messages a day. Not one of them asked where I was. Nobody had noticed that I was gone, and that, I think, was nobody’s fault.
Group chats are everywhere now, and what they offer is a kind of ambient company. Somewhere close by, people are talking, a little like a radio left on in the next room. It is pleasant. It is also easy to mistake for friendship. In a group of sixty, everyone is reachable and no one is responsible. An absence there never stands out. A silence does not look like someone missing; it looks like someone busy.
I do not want to be unfair to the phone. My closest friend from school moved to Guwahati in Class 10, and for six years we have kept going on voice notes, long rambling ones recorded on evening walks. That friendship lives almost entirely online, and it is as real as anything I have. But it lives in a chat of two.
So the line I keep drawing is less between the screen and the room than between the crowd and the pair. Friendship, it seems to me, needs someone whose business it is to notice you. What to do about this, I am less sure. On the fourth day I muted eleven groups, felt oddly guilty, and by evening had unmuted three of them.
Which of the following best expresses the central argument of the passage?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → Crowded group chats feel like company, but friendship, online or not, seems to need someone who is there to notice you.
The writer compares busy group chats with real friendship and finds what the chats lack.
- The groups give “a kind of ambient company”. It feels like people talking nearby. The writer calls it “pleasant”.
- But in a big group “no one is responsible”. During the fever, nobody noticed the writer was gone.
- The friendship with the school friend is almost fully online, and it is “as real as anything”. So the writer does not blame the screen.
- The last paragraph gives the main point. Friendship “needs someone whose business it is to notice you”.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: Friendships kept up through a phone are thinner than those built in person, and they tend to fade once people move apart. — Incorrect. Contradicted: The friend moved to Guwahati six years ago. Their friendship lives online, and the writer calls it real.
Option 2: Students should mute most of their group chats, since the endless messages leave them feeling ignored and guilty. — Incorrect. Overstated: The writer gives no advice to students. The writer muted eleven groups and then unmuted three, and says “I am less sure” what to do.
Option 3: A fever in the hostel showed the writer that the classmates in the class group had stopped caring about the writer. — Incorrect. Contradicted: The writer says the silence “was nobody’s fault”. The writer does not accuse the classmates of not caring.