Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
Long before places had numbers, a letter in India travelled on foot. Under the Mughals, and in kingdoms before them, runners carried the dak in relays. Each man ran his own stretch and handed the bag on. Many carried a spear, and bells that jangled as they ran. No runner needed to know where a letter would end up. He needed only the road to the next village.
That small fact explains a good deal about the post. It has never needed one person to understand the whole map, only each person to know the next step. For most of its history, the hard part was the last step. Indian addresses were descriptions rather than coordinates: the house behind the Hanuman temple, the second lane after the flour mill. A letter addressed like that arrived because some postman remembered which Gupta family had moved and which lane had been renamed.
The PIN code, introduced on 15 August 1972, tried to take some of that memory out of human heads. Its six digits narrow a destination in stages, from a broad region of the country down to a single delivery post office. A sorter in a distant city no longer had to know the town. He had only to read a number. There is nothing glamorous about this workaday invention, though it quietly moves mail across one of the largest postal networks in the world.
Yet the number did not finish the job. It brings the letter to the right post office, and there its work stops. From that counter to the door, India still writes “near the old water tank”, and the post still sends someone who knows where the tank used to be.
The word ‘workaday’, as used in the passage, means:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 1
The correct answer is Option (1) → plain and ordinary, used daily without much notice
Workaday means ordinary and everyday, not special or exciting.
- The writer says there is “nothing glamorous” about the PIN code. Glamorous means exciting and attractive. So the code is plain.
- Yet it “quietly” moves mail every day across a huge network. It is ordinary and useful, and people hardly notice it. Example: The famous chef said that a workaday plate of dal and rice was still his favourite meal.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 2: needing a great deal of hard physical work — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: This is the meaning of laborious. Example: Copying the whole register by hand was a laborious task.
Option 3: lasting for only a short time before it is replaced — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: This is the meaning of short-lived. Example: The fashion for neon socks was short-lived.
Option 4: made of many small parts and hard to follow — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: This is the meaning of complicated. Example: The rules of the new board game were too complicated for my grandmother.