Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
Last winter a fever kept me in my hostel room for three days. My phone, propped against a water bottle, lit up every few minutes. There were thirty-odd groups on it: the class group, the batch group, a group for a trek that never happened, and one named only with a cricket-ball emoji. Between them they sent some four hundred messages a day. Not one of them asked where I was. Nobody had noticed that I was gone, and that, I think, was nobody’s fault.
Group chats are everywhere now, and what they offer is a kind of ambient company. Somewhere close by, people are talking, a little like a radio left on in the next room. It is pleasant. It is also easy to mistake for friendship. In a group of sixty, everyone is reachable and no one is responsible. An absence there never stands out. A silence does not look like someone missing; it looks like someone busy.
I do not want to be unfair to the phone. My closest friend from school moved to Guwahati in Class 10, and for six years we have kept going on voice notes, long rambling ones recorded on evening walks. That friendship lives almost entirely online, and it is as real as anything I have. But it lives in a chat of two.
So the line I keep drawing is less between the screen and the room than between the crowd and the pair. Friendship, it seems to me, needs someone whose business it is to notice you. What to do about this, I am less sure. On the fourth day I muted eleven groups, felt oddly guilty, and by evening had unmuted three of them.
The writer’s action on the fourth day suggests that the writer
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → still wants some of the easy company the groups give, even after seeing what they lack
On the fourth day the writer muted eleven groups, felt guilty, and unmuted three by evening.
- By then the writer has seen the weak side of the groups. Nobody in them noticed the writer was missing.
- Yet the writer earlier called their company “pleasant”, like a radio in the next room.
- Turning three groups back on shows that the writer is not ready to give up this easy company.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: has come to believe that group chats do more harm than good and are best given up altogether — Incorrect. Contradicted: The writer muted only some groups and then unmuted three. That is not giving them up.
Option 2: wanted the members of the groups to see that the writer had been unwell and alone — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The passage says nothing about the writer wanting to be noticed through muting.
Option 3: was afraid of missing news about a trek, even though the one planned earlier never happened — Incorrect. Wrong link: The trek group is only one name in the list of groups. Nothing links it to the groups that were unmuted.