Comprehension:
If the system hadn’t stalled, Antar would never have guessed that the scrap of paper on his screen was the remnant of an ID card. It looked as though it had been rescued from a fire: the plastic laminate was warped and melted along the edge. The lettering was mostly illegible, and the photograph had vanished under a smudge of soot. But a four-inch metal chain had somehow stayed attached to the card: it hung down in a rusty loop from a perforation in the top left-hand corner, like a drooping tail. It was the chain that triggered the system, not the card.
The card turned up in one of those routine inventories that went flashing around the globe with metronome regularity, for no reason that Antar could understand, except that it was what the system did best. Once it got started, it would keep them coming, hour after hour, an endless succession of documents and objects, stopping only when it stumbled on something it couldn’t file: the most trivial things usually. Once it was a glass paperweight, of the kind that rain snowflakes if you turn them upside down; another time it was a bottle of correcting fluid, from an irrigation overseer’s office just south of the Arab Sea. Both times the machine went into a controlled frenzy, firing off questions, one after another.
Antar had met children who were like that: What? Why? When? Where? How? But the children asked because they were curious. With these AVA/IIe systems it was something else - something he could only think of as a simulated urge for self-improvement. He’d been using Ava for a couple of years now, and he was still awed by her eagerness to become herself. Anything she did not recognise, she’d take apart on screen, producing ever greater refinements of details.
Read the passage carefully and choose the option that explains the context of the passage:-
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → The passage hints at the beginning of a story about Antar and a search engine database called Ava that can identify an endless succession of objects and documents.
The passage opens a story: Antar watches his AVA/IIe system, Ava, run "routine inventories" of "an endless succession of documents and objects" and stall over a burnt ID card. Option 3 is the only option that sums up this beginning; the others add things the passage does not say.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: The passage talks about the story of Ava and Antar and their desire to have kids. — Incorrect. Not mentioned: children appear only in a comparison, "Antar had met children who were like that"; nobody wants to have children.
Option 2: The passage follows the life of Ava who is on a quest for self-improvement and needs help from Antar to identify an ID card. — Incorrect. Contradicted: Ava is a machine, not a person with a life, and "anything she did not recognise, she’d take apart on screen" on her own; she does not need Antar’s help.
Option 4: The passage is about a sentient artificial intelligent software called Ava that specialises in creating inventory lists of trivial objects. — Incorrect. Overstated: the passage calls Ava’s urge for self-improvement "simulated", so it does not show her as sentient (able to feel); she stalls on trivial things, she does not list only trivial things.