Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
At eleven at night, a girl in Pune whom I will never meet opens her laptop, sets a timer for fifty minutes and starts to study. I open mine and do the same. Nearly four thousand strangers are watching her on YouTube, and none of us says a word. The chat is switched off. There is only the scratch of her pen and, now and then, the soft slap of a page being turned.
Older relatives find this baffling. My uncle asked me, not unkindly, why I needed a stranger on a screen to make me open a chemistry textbook. It is a fair question, and the honest answer is a little embarrassing. Alone in my room, I drift. Ten minutes of revision becomes forty minutes of reels. With her on the screen, I feel watched in the gentlest possible way, the way a library makes you lower your voice even when nobody has asked you to.
There is a name for this, body doubling, and it is often suggested to people who find it hard to begin a task. But I suspect its pull for my generation has less to do with method than with mood. We were told the internet would connect us. Mostly it has taught us to perform: the polished post, the screenshot of a result. These study streams ask for nothing. Nobody is ranked. Nobody is liked or ignored.
I am not naive about it. The streamer earns from our attention, and a silent room on a screen is still a screen. Yet on the nights when the syllabus feels interminable, that quiet company is enough to keep me at my desk until the timer rings.
What can be inferred from the writer’s remark that the internet “has taught us to perform”?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → Much of online life feels to the writer like putting on a show to be judged by others.
To perform here means to put on a show for others to watch and judge.
- The writer gives two cases: “the polished post” and “the screenshot of a result”. Polished means made to look perfect. We share such things so that others will praise us.
- Then the writer says study streams are different. “Nobody is ranked. Nobody is liked or ignored.”
- For the writer, then, much of online life is a show put on for others to judge.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: Young people now prefer watching live streams to posting on social media. — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The writer watches study streams. But the passage does not say young people prefer streams to posting.
Option 2: Most young people dislike the internet and would like to give it up. — Incorrect. Overstated: The writer says the internet has not connected us as promised. But nowhere does the writer say young people want to give it up.
Option 3: Young people feel lonely because nobody online notices their posts. — Incorrect. Wrong focus: The word “ignored” is in the passage. But the remark is about putting on a show for others, not about feeling lonely.