Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
My college friend Ishita posts a thrift haul every second Sunday. She lays the pieces out on her bed: a corduroy jacket for two hundred rupees, three shirts from a pile at Sarojini Nagar, jeans from a brand not sold in India. The video ends with the total in fat yellow letters, and the comments ask how she does it. I used to watch with envy. Now a small question nags at me.
Thrifting is meant to be the answer to fast fashion. Buy what already exists, the argument goes, and you stop feeding the factories that turn out a new collection every few weeks. As far as it goes, I agree. The trouble is the word ‘haul’, which is about quantity. Ishita goes to the market nominally for a jacket she needs, but what she really needs is a video for Sunday. Half of what she buys is worn once, for the camera, then folded onto a shelf she calls, without any irony, her archive.
A shirt rescued from a pile, she would say, beats a new one ordered from an app. She is right. No fresh cotton was grown for it, no fresh dye poured into a river. But when the low total is the whole point of the video, viewers learn that clothes are too cheap to think about. Fast fashion has been teaching that for years.
My grandmother owned perhaps fifteen saris and could tell you who had worn each one before her. By her arithmetic, a jacket worn forty times is cheap even at two thousand rupees, and one worn once is dear at two hundred. I have not said this to Ishita. Her next video goes up on Sunday, and I will probably watch it.
Which of the following is the most suitable title for the passage?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → The Real Price of a Two-Hundred-Rupee Jacket
The passage asks what a cheap thrifted piece of clothing really costs.
- It opens with a jacket bought for two hundred rupees in Ishita’s haul.
- The low price hides a cost. Clothes worn once teach viewers that clothes are too cheap to think about.
- By the grandmother’s way of counting, one worn once is “dear at two hundred”. Dear here means costly. So the title catches the main question of the passage.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: Why Thrifting Beats Fast Fashion — Incorrect. Only partly true: The writer grants that a rescued shirt is better. But the passage mainly doubts whether haul videos are any better than fast fashion.
Option 2: My Friend, the Thrift Influencer — Incorrect. Too narrow: Ishita is the example the writer uses. The passage is about the cost of cheap clothes, not about her.
Option 4: Clothes, Waste and the Environment — Incorrect. Too broad: The passage touches on cotton and dye in one line. It does not deal with clothing waste and the environment as a whole.