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:

Global sustainability discourse has not so much evolved as ossified into a lexicon of managerial (1) ______-terms engineered more for reputational lubrication than ecological redress. What was once a moral reckoning with planetary precariousness now traffics in dashboards and metrics, calibrated less to redistribute power than to launder it. Words like “resilience,” “stakeholder engagement,” and “net-zero” populate position papers, their meanings stretched until they acquire the elasticity of (2) ______ in this semantic economy, language ceases to be revelatory and becomes performative. Reports teeter on euphemism; declarations bristle with procedural piety. Crises are not named; they are (3) ______ into “developmental challenges.” The grammar of suffering is bleached, even as the facts remain uncompromising. What emerges is not truth, but a choreography of credibility—an affective simulation of care. Meanwhile, epistemic asymmetries persist: indigenous knowledge is (4) ______ as “local insight,” offered just enough space to decorate, never to reorient. Environmental justice, once confrontational, now wears a diplomatic smile, folded neatly into intergovernmental communiqués. If sustainability is to escape the orbit of self-congratulation, it must surrender its obsession with optics and inhabit the discomfort of history. Anything less is not stewardship—it is semantic (5) ______ masquerading as progress.