SSC CGL 2025 Tier-I · 20 September 2025, Shift 1 · English Comprehension · Question 11 of 100

We transcribed this text from the pictures on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; the answer is the key SSC colour-marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 13 September 2026.

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 (3)?

(a)transposes
(b)articulates
(c)conceals
(d)materializes

Answer

Why

Correct — D. The verb needs an object and a result: 'a spatial discourse that (3) ___ the nation-state’s promises into sedimented form.'

Promises are abstract. Sedimented means settled and hardened in layers, like sediment, so the verb must turn something abstract into something solid.

Materializes means gives physical form to something. Built space giving the state's promises solid form → option (d).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
transposes — Transposes means shifts into a different place, order or musical key. It names a move, not the change from abstract to solid that 'into sedimented form' describes.
(b)
articulates — Articulates means expresses clearly. The passage uses it that way in its last sentence: 'the postcolonial built environment articulates not stasis'. Expressing a promise does not settle it into sedimented form.
(c)
conceals — Conceals means hides. The passage argues the opposite: these structures display the state's promises, as roads that signify mobility and 'a visual vocabulary of state temporality'.

Concept

The sentence swaps one description for another: infrastructure 'ceases to be an engineering problem and becomes a narrative technology'.

The dash explains the new description: a spatial discourse, a statement made in built space rather than in words.

The blank's verb says what that discourse does to the state's promises. The object is abstract (promises) and the result is solid (sedimented form), so the verb has to bridge the two. Materializes does.

All four options are present-tense verbs agreeing with 'a spatial discourse that', so grammar cannot separate them. The phrase into sedimented form decides it.

Key facts

Materialize: to give physical form to something, or to take physical form.
Sedimented: settled in layers, like sediment, and so fixed and solid.
Transpose: to move into a different place, order or musical key.
Articulate: to express an idea clearly.

Study next

Verbs of change that take into: transform into, translate into, crystallize intoVerb blanks decided by the object and the phrase after it, when every option fits the grammar

Common traps

Choosing articulates because narrative and discourse sound like speech, and missing that 'into sedimented form' asks for a solid result
Hunting for a grammar clue when all four options agree with the subject, so meaning alone decides

A verb blank settled by its object also appears at 12 Sep 2025, 12:30, English Q.9, where 'the entrenched bureaucratic inertia' is something dug in and the key is dislodge.

Blanks (2), (4) and (5) of this passage are English Q.10, Q.12 and Q.13.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.

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.