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.
By mentioning that Dickens’s readers ‘waited for his novels in monthly parts’, the writer implies that
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → reading a story in parts, and arguing over each part, is an old habit and not one the phone created
The writer brings in Dickens to show that stories told in parts are not new.
- Web novels are posted as short chapters, and readers quarrel in the comments under each one.
- Right after this the writer says, “Little of this is as new as it looks.” Dickens’s readers also waited for each monthly part, “and argued over them too”.
- So the habit of waiting for the next part, and arguing about it, is much older than the phone.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: Dickens, like today’s apps, ended each part on a hook so that readers would pay for the next one — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The passage links the hook only to today’s apps. It says nothing about how Dickens ended his parts.
Option 2: webtoons and web novels will one day be read as classics, just as Dickens is read today — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The comparison is about how the stories were read, not about how good they are.
Option 3: readers in Dickens’s time were more patient with a story than young readers are now — Incorrect. Wrong focus: The writer points to what the two groups share, not to a difference in patience.