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.
Which of the following best expresses the central argument of the passage?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → Phone reading has changed the form in which stories reach the young, not their love of them, though its paid design troubles the writer.
The writer argues that the phone has changed how young people read stories, but not their wish to read them.
- Meher says she does not read. Yet she reads a webtoon on the bus and a web novel at night. The writer thinks she reads “more than I did at her age”.
- The last paragraph says this plainly. The screen “has not dulled her hunger for stories”. It has only “changed the shape” in which they reach her.
- The writer is still ambivalent, which means having mixed feelings. The apps make readers pay or wait, so each episode ends on a hook “to sell”. This is what bothers the writer.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: Webtoons and web novels are the monthly serials of Dickens’s day in a new form, and should be judged in the same way. — Incorrect. Too narrow: The Dickens line is one side point. The writer then points to a real difference, the paid hook at the end of each episode.
Option 3: Young readers like Meher have given up reading, because phone apps have taken the place of printed books. — Incorrect. Contradicted: The writer says Meher reads more than the writer did at her age. She only does not call it reading.
Option 4: Paid reading apps do young readers more harm than good, since their chapters are written mainly to make readers buy coins late at night. — Incorrect. Overstated: The writer is uneasy about the paid design but says “I cannot bring myself to be gloomy”. The writer never weighs harm against good.