SSC CGL 2025 PYQ — Question 86

In the given passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage intently and choose the most appropriate option to fill in each blank:

To speak of skill education merely in terms of employment is to overlook its deeper cartography. A skill, unlike rote instruction, is (1) -given not not only through repetition but through failure-through the art of learning why something didn't work. In societies obsessed with certification, the nuanced textures of experiential learning often vanish behind laminated credentials. Yet, the true economy of skill is shaped not in boardrooms or training modules, but in the improvisations of the workshop, the reworkings of the prototype, the quiet recalibration of hand and intent. The question, then, is not how many are trained, but how many are truly (2) just tools but the time to develop trust in them. Skill is not the opposite of theory, but its extension into movement. And yet, the classroom remains strangely allergic to the tactile. The logic of assessments continues to value abstraction over (3) reducing competence to the ability to recall, not to remake. In the rush to map vocational pathways, we risk scripting lives as modules-linear, predictable, void of deviation. But skill, like thought, thrives in divergence. Its pedagogy must embrace the messiness of practice, the necessity of slowness, and the possibility of (4) _. To prepare youth for uncertainty, we must teach them to linger-not just to do, but to (5) doing.

What should come in the place of blank number (2)?