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.
The word ‘interminable’, as used in the passage, means:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → so long that it seems never to end
Interminable means so long that it seems never to end.
- The writer says that on some nights “the syllabus feels interminable”. The syllabus is the full list of topics to study for an exam.
- On such nights so much is left to cover that it seems endless. The quiet company of the stream keeps the writer going. Example: We stood in an interminable queue outside the bank to update our passbooks.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: too hard to understand — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: This is the meaning of incomprehensible. The writer’s worry is how long the syllabus is, not how hard. Example: The doctor’s handwriting on the slip was incomprehensible to us.
Option 3: not yet fixed or settled — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: This is the meaning of indeterminate. A syllabus that seems endless is not one that is unsettled. Example: Because of the rain, the date of the cricket final is still indeterminate.
Option 4: strict and harsh in its demands — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: This is the meaning of stringent. The passage speaks of the syllabus seeming long, not strict. Example: Our school has stringent rules about phones in class.