Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
At eleven at night, a girl in Pune whom I will never meet opens her laptop, sets a timer for fifty minutes and starts to study. I open mine and do the same. Nearly four thousand strangers are watching her on YouTube, and none of us says a word. The chat is switched off. There is only the scratch of her pen and, now and then, the soft slap of a page being turned.
Older relatives find this baffling. My uncle asked me, not unkindly, why I needed a stranger on a screen to make me open a chemistry textbook. It is a fair question, and the honest answer is a little embarrassing. Alone in my room, I drift. Ten minutes of revision becomes forty minutes of reels. With her on the screen, I feel watched in the gentlest possible way, the way a library makes you lower your voice even when nobody has asked you to.
There is a name for this, body doubling, and it is often suggested to people who find it hard to begin a task. But I suspect its pull for my generation has less to do with method than with mood. We were told the internet would connect us. Mostly it has taught us to perform: the polished post, the screenshot of a result. These study streams ask for nothing. Nobody is ranked. Nobody is liked or ignored.
I am not naive about it. The streamer earns from our attention, and a silent room on a screen is still a screen. Yet on the nights when the syllabus feels interminable, that quiet company is enough to keep me at my desk until the timer rings.
According to the passage, what puzzles the writer’s uncle?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 1
The correct answer is Option (1) → Why the writer cannot begin studying unless an unknown person is seen studying on a screen
The second paragraph tells us what the uncle asked.
- Older relatives find the habit baffling. Baffling means very hard to understand.
- The uncle asks why the writer needs “a stranger on a screen” to open a chemistry textbook. A stranger is an unknown person.
- He is puzzled that the writer cannot start without one.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 2: Why the writer chooses to study so late at night rather than early in the morning — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The writer does study at eleven at night. But the uncle says nothing about the time.
Option 3: Why thousands of strangers would pay money to watch a girl in Pune study — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The uncle asks only about the writer. He says nothing about the viewers or about money.
Option 4: Why the writer spends forty minutes on reels instead of revising — Incorrect. Wrong link: The reels are in the writer’s own answer to the uncle. The uncle did not ask about them.