SSC CGL 2025 PYQ — Question 16

SSC CGL - 20 Sep 2025 - Shift 3 • 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:

"Urban decay is not merely a symptom of infrastructural attrition, but a semantic artifact—where stone and steel become archives of deferred modernities. Cracks, corrosion, and spectral scaffolds do not degrade meaning; they transmute it, encoding absence as presence and entropy as (1) ______. These architectural residues defy the chronological hygiene of master-plans, offering instead a fugitive temporality—unruly, sedimented, and unresolved. The ruin, in this schema, is not a failure of design, but an overdetermined syntax of collapse. Its grammar speaks through spalling concrete and oxidized signage, refusing the gloss of civic optimism. To aestheticize such decay without critique is to partake in ontological (2) ______—rendering disorder decorative and suffering sublime. What masquerades as renewal often constitutes spatial evisceration, where memory is evacuated in favor of speculative capital and "heritage" becomes a euphemism for curatorial sanitization. To read ruins poetically is to displace utility with (3) ______: to allow detritus to articulate that which infrastructure occludes. These spaces demand not beautification, but semiotic excavation—where rusted balustrades and defunct corridors become sites of interpretive insurgency. Yet decay resists even romanticization. It is not allegory, but ontic excess—a surplus that confounds enclosure. Gentrification cannot domesticate it; nostalgia cannot vitrify it. It lingers, mutinous and mnemonic, as a (4) ______ syntax etched across municipal forgetting. The city's ruins are not relics. They are discursive glitches—interruptions in the urban script that demand to be read not as loss, but as infrastructural (5) ______."

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. laundering.

Context: The sentence criticizes beautifying decay without addressing its reality.

Meaning of the options:

  • Excess: More than necessary.
  • Laundering: Concealing or sanitizing something problematic.
  • Disintegration: Breaking apart.
  • Reiteration: Repetition.

Correct word: laundering

Reason: “Ontological laundering” implies masking harsh realities, making disorder appear acceptable.

Final Sentence: …to partake in ontological laundering.

Hence, the chosen option is correct.