Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
My younger sister Zoya keeps a spreadsheet on her phone, and it is not for exams. It lists time slots, each with a name, and the rules at the top say nobody mutes the video and nobody loops it from a single account. When her favourite K-pop group drops a new song, forty strangers from Pune to Manila follow that sheet all weekend. They call it a streaming party, though nobody seems to be having much fun.
I used to find this faintly absurd. Why should a nineteen-year-old treat a view count like a civic duty? Then, on one singer’s birthday, I watched her fan group raise money for a children’s ward in a single evening. Other fandoms plant trees in a singer’s name, or send sacks of rice to a concert instead of flowers, and the rice is given away later. None of this is ordered from above. It is planned by people who have never met.
So I no longer laugh. A crowd that can do this is learning something many adults never learn: how to act together without waiting for a leader. But the same muscle that fills a charity box can flatten a person. Last month Zoya’s chat turned on a reviewer who had called a song dull. They flooded her replies until she locked her account. And the streaming parties, for all their team spirit, hand record labels thousands of hours of free labour.
The fans I know are not naive about this. Some argue about it more sharply than any critic. Still, my admiration has become a wary one. Zoya says the reviewer deserved it. I am not sure she believes that, because she said it without looking up from the sheet.
Which of the following best expresses the central argument of the passage?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 1
The correct answer is Option (1) → Organised fans have learnt to act together without a leader, but that skill can wound as easily as it helps.
The writer first laughed at fan groups, then came to admire them, but the admiration has limits.
- The good side: the fans raise money for a children’s ward “in a single evening”. They are learning “how to act together without waiting for a leader”.
- The bad side: “the same muscle that fills a charity box can flatten a person”. The chat drove a reviewer to lock her account.
- So the writer’s admiration has become “a wary one”. Wary means careful because something could go wrong.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 2: Streaming parties waste the free time of young fans and mainly serve to make record labels richer. — Incorrect. Too narrow: The point about free labour for record labels is one side point. The passage is about the fan groups’ power as a whole, good and bad.
Option 3: K-pop fans now raise more money for good causes than most groups of adults manage to raise. — Incorrect. Misread: The writer says fans learn what many adults “never learn”, that is, how to act together. No money is compared with adults.
Option 4: Fan groups that attack critics online ought to be broken up by the calmer and wiser members within those groups. — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The writer worries about the attack on the reviewer. But the writer never says the groups should be broken up.