SSC CGL 2025 PYQ — Question 15

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

The pursuit of global equity in the anthropocene is less a matter of distributive justice and more a theatre of ontological misrecognition. While the Global North presents technocratic solutions as universally applicable, such solutions often encode assumptions of temporal supremacy and civilizational [1] _________. Climate finance, for instance, masquerades as benevolence while entrenching hierarchies of surveillance and dependence. The epistemes of the South, rather than being engaged on their own terms, are often reconfigured through extractive logics of 'capacity building,' a term whose etymology betrays its colonial [2]________. Embedded within these discourses is the idea that certain populations must be 'readied' for modernity—thus reproducing a pedagogical asymmetry that masks itself as aid. Meanwhile, planetary imaginaries are increasingly framed through cartographies of emergency. The language of 'tipping points' and 'irreversible loss' evokes a moral urgency that, paradoxically, facilitates a form of ecological [3]________, wherein radical structural reform is substituted by incremental techno-fixes. Carbon offsets, biodiversity credits, and green financialization proliferate not as correctives, but as symptoms of an underlying refusal to dislodge anthropocentric capitalism. In such a milieu, protest is not silence-breaking but often met with strategic [4]________, where rhetorical accommodation obscures institutional inertia. Civil society is co-opted, not crushed. The subaltern voice is archived, not amplified. Thus, to reclaim ecological justice is not merely to demand inclusion, but to interrogate the ontologies that define inclusion itself. Absent this, the dream of planetary stewardship will remain a ceremonial [5]________, rich in symbolism, barren in substance."