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.
Which of the following is the most suitable title for the passage?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → More Than a List of Firsts: How Aryabhata Questioned the Sky
The best title names the writer’s main point about Aryabhata.
- The writer says lists of firsts miss what matters most. Aryabhata left “a habit of asking how the sky actually works”.
- The examples of the stars, the eclipses and the word “approximate” all show this habit. The title covers both the list and the questioning.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: India’s First Satellite and the Man Behind Its Name — Incorrect. Too narrow: The satellite is mentioned only in the opening line.
Option 3: Stars, Shadows and Numbers: A History of Indian Astronomy — Incorrect. Too broad: The passage is about one astronomer, not the whole history of astronomy in India.
Option 4: The Astronomer Who Measured the Circle Exactly — Incorrect. Contradicted: Aryabhata himself calls his value of pi “approximate”, not exact.