SSC CGL 2025 PYQ — Question 16

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

Climate discourse, once the domain of ecological alarm and policy whitepapers, has now become a theater of geopolitical choreography. What masquerades as international cooperation often (1)_______ the residues of colonial asymmetry—where culpability is distributed politely, but power still negotiates who must "transition" and who may continue. The carbon footprint becomes a moral metric only when traced in Southern sand; in Northern snow, it is reframed as "developmental necessity." Funding mechanisms are not immune to this dissonance. Green finance flows in tributaries engineered by creditworthiness, not climate need. Adaptation becomes a (2)_______, where vulnerable nations perform resilience to attract capital, rather than receive redress. "Net zero," meanwhile, floats like a talisman—invoked often, defined rarely. In such a paradigm, technocratic optimism obscures the uneven cartography of suffering. Satellites scan deforested zones with precision, but remain blind to the (3)_______ histories beneath them. Carbon markets, too, offer the illusion of absolution—one entity's excess "offset" by another's austerity. But offsets do not erase the heat; they only relocate the guilt. To resist climate colonialism is to unmask the benevolence of treaties and question the neutrality of metrics. Until the grammar of environmental justice is (4)_______, and not merely adjusted, any climate action risks becoming a ritual of (5)_______, not repair.