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 statements are NOT true according to the passage?
(A) Webtoon artists can use blank space on the scroll to slow down a moment in the story.
(B) Web novels are usually released as complete books for readers to finish in one go.
(C) Meher has paid for a chapter that she soon forgot.
(D) The writer believes the phone has left young readers with little interest in stories.
Choose the correct answer from the options given below:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → (B) and (D) only
The question asks for the statements that are NOT true.
(A) Webtoon artists can use blank space on the scroll to slow down a moment in the story. — True.
- An artist can “lengthen a pause by leaving a band of empty white” between two panels.
(B) Web novels are usually released as complete books for readers to finish in one go. — Not true.
- Web novels come as “short chapters, posted on schedule”.
- Meher’s web novel adds a chapter almost every day.
(C) Meher has paid for a chapter that she soon forgot. — True.
- She “bought coins at midnight for a chapter she had forgotten by breakfast”.
(D) The writer believes the phone has left young readers with little interest in stories. — Not true.
- The writer says the screen “has not dulled her hunger for stories”.