Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
My niece Meher, who is fifteen, insists that she does not read. She then spends the forty minutes of her bus ride home scrolling down one long strip of a Korean webtoon, panel stacked on panel, her thumb keeping pace with the story. At night she follows a web novel that adds a chapter almost every day. By my count she reads more than I did at her age. She just does not call it reading, because nobody handed her a book.
Webtoons were made for the phone. There are no pages to turn, only a vertical scroll. An artist can lengthen a pause by leaving a band of empty white between two panels, or hide a shock just below the edge of the screen. Web novels do the same thing with words: short chapters, posted on schedule, with readers quarrelling in the comments under each one. Little of this is as new as it looks. Dickens’s readers waited for his novels in monthly parts, and argued over them too.
Still, I am more ambivalent than my niece would like. Many of these apps let you read ahead only if you pay or wait, so each episode is built to end on a hook, and the hook is there to sell. Meher admits she has bought coins at midnight for a chapter she had forgotten by breakfast. The stories are read on borrowed minutes, in queues and between classes, and some are written to fit nothing longer.
Yet I cannot bring myself to be gloomy. The screen has not dulled her hunger for stories; it has changed the shape in which they reach her. What bothers me is not the scroll but the meter running quietly beside it.
The phrase ‘the meter running quietly beside it’, as used in the last paragraph, refers to
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → the paying system that keeps charging readers as they go on reading
A meter is a machine that keeps counting what you owe, like the meter in a taxi. Here the writer uses it for the way the apps charge readers.
- The third paragraph explains it. The apps let you read ahead “only if you pay or wait”. Meher has bought coins at midnight for one chapter.
- So, as she reads, the cost keeps adding up out of sight, like a taxi meter during a ride. That is the meter running quietly beside the scroll.
- The writer says the scroll itself is not the problem. The paying is.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: the screen-time count that tells Meher how long she has spent on her phone — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The passage never talks about tracking screen time. The worry in it is about money.
Option 2: the speed at which a reader’s thumb moves down the vertical scroll — Incorrect. Wrong link: The thumb is mentioned in the first paragraph. But the last line sets the meter apart from the scroll: “not the scroll but the meter”.
Option 3: the steady stream of comments that readers post under each chapter — Incorrect. Wrong link: The comments come up in the second paragraph. The writer does not object to them anywhere.