SSC CGL 2024 PYQ — Question 21

In the following passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage carefully and select the most appropriate option to fill in each blank.

The mathematician Federico Ardila-Mantilla grew up in Colombia, an (1) ______________ student but gifted in math. He was failing most of his classes at his high school in Bogotá when someone (2) _______________ him to apply to MIT. He had not heard of the school. To his surprise, he got in, and he went on scholarship. Mathematically, he did well. One of his professors, an acid-tongued theoretician known to (3) ____________ his audience to a herd of cows, routinely tucked ‘open’ math problems into homework assignments, without telling the students. These had never been solved by anyone. Ardila solved one. He went on to receive his bachelor’s and Ph.D. in math from MIT. But his academic experience was also one of isolation. Part of it had to do with his own (4) _____________. Part of it was cultural. As a Latino, he was very much in the minority in the department, and he did not feel comfortable in American mathematical spaces. No one had tried to explicitly (5) ______________ him, yet he felt alone. In math, collaborating with others opens up new kinds of learning and thinking. But in his nine years at MIT, Ardila worked with others only twice.