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 writer’s attitude towards study streams can best be described as:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → Quiet appreciation, tempered by an awareness of their drawbacks
The writer likes the study streams but also sees their weak points.
- The writer values their “quiet company”. On hard nights it keeps the writer at the desk. This is appreciation, which means seeing the worth of something.
- The writer also says, “I am not naive about it.” Naive means too quick to believe that all is good. The streamer earns from the viewers, and it is still a screen. These are the drawbacks, or weak points.
- Tempered by means made milder by. The writer’s liking is made milder by these doubts.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: Wholehearted praise for a habit the writer thinks every student should adopt — Incorrect. Overstated: Wholehearted means full and without any doubt. But the writer says, “I am not naive about it.” So the praise comes with doubts.
Option 2: Cynical suspicion of streamers who make money from lonely viewers — Incorrect. Only partly true: Cynical means believing that people act only for selfish reasons. The writer does say the streamer earns from “our attention”. But this is one small doubt. The writer is thankful for the streams, not suspicious of them.
Option 3: Embarrassed regret at having to depend on a stranger in order to study — Incorrect. Only partly true: The writer calls the honest answer “a little embarrassing”. But there is no regret. Regret means wishing you had not done something. The writer still uses the streams and values them.