SSC CGL 2025 PYQ — Question 16

SSC CGL - 20 Sep 2025 - Shift 1 • English • Q16

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

Postcolonial infrastructures often inhabit a schizochronic condition—a simultaneity of obsolescence and futurity. Flyovers half-finished, railway stations calcified mid-renovation, and electric grids oscillating between blackout and surplus do not signify simple malfunction. Rather, they manifest a (1)__________ temporality in which the present is neither a continuity of the past nor a stable projection of the future. These infrastructures function not as inert utilities but as affective indexes of temporal rupture. Modernity, once telegraphed through asphalt and concrete, now flickers within these arrested developments—gestures of progress suspended in bureaucratic amber. Here, functionality is beside the point. What matters is the performative (2)__________ of development: roads that signify mobility even when impassable, metros that symbolize futurity even when immobile. In this schema, infrastructure ceases to be an engineering problem and becomes a narrative technology—a spatial discourse that (3)__________ the nation-state's promises into sedimented form. Bridges-to-be and always-rebuilding airports constitute not failure, but continuity: the continual renewal of unfinished intention. Such spatial artifacts require a recalibrated hermeneutics. To read them literally is to miss their symbolic resonance. Their disrepair is not decay but (4)__________: a visual vocabulary of state temporality, in which incompletion is the political idiom of continuity. This is the temporal grammar of anticipation without arrival. Thus, the postcolonial built environment articulates not stasis, but (5)__________—a condition where motion exists without direction, and progress is simulated through perpetual incompletion.

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

Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: B

Explanation

The correct answer is option 2 i.e. semiotics.

Context: The sentence emphasizes the symbolic or sign-based function of development rather than its practical use.

Meaning of the words:

Collapse: Breakdown or failure.
Semiotics: Study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation.
Hesitation: Pause due to uncertainty.
Repair: Fixing something.

Correct word: Semiotics

Reason: “Semiotics” fits perfectly as the passage discusses symbolic meaning (roads and metros representing ideas rather than functioning).

Final Sentence: What matters is the performative semiotics of development: roads that signify mobility even when impassable, metros that symbolize futurity even when immobile.

Hence the chosen option is correct.