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.
What can be inferred from the writer’s remark that Meher does not call it reading “because nobody handed her a book”?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → Meher links the word ‘reading’ with printed books, not with what she does on her phone.
Meher reads every day, but only on her phone, so she does not count it as reading.
- She scrolls a webtoon on the bus and follows a web novel at night. Still she “insists that she does not read”.
- The reason given is that “nobody handed her a book”. For Meher, reading means holding a printed book. Stories on a screen do not seem to count.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: Meher’s family has never bought her any books of her own. — Incorrect. Misread: This takes the line too literally. The writer is talking about how Meher sees reading, not about gifts from her family.
Option 2: Meher is embarrassed to admit how much time she spends on her phone. — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The passage shows no sign that Meher feels ashamed of her phone time.
Option 4: Meher reads less than the writer did, because webtoons have more pictures than words. — Incorrect. Contradicted: The writer says Meher reads “more than I did at her age”.