SSC CGL 2025 Tier-I · 20 September 2025, Shift 1 · English Comprehension · Question 12 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 (4)?

(a)expression
(b)default
(c)entropy
(d)nostalgia

Answer

Why

Correct — A. The sentence is 'Their disrepair is not decay but (4) ___: a visual vocabulary of state temporality ...'

Not X but Y sets the blank against decay, so it cannot be another word for falling apart.

The colon glosses it as a visual vocabulary, a way of saying something. Expression is the conveying of meaning, and it fits the language words around it, vocabulary and 'political idiom' → option (a).

Why the others are wrong

(b)
default — Default means a failure to pay or to do what is owed, as in a loan default. That is one more kind of failure, which 'not decay but' has just ruled out, and it is not a vocabulary.
(c)
entropy — Entropy is a gradual decline into disorder. That is decay by another name, and 'not decay but' needs a contrast with decay, not a synonym of it.
(d)
nostalgia — Nostalgia is a longing for the past. The passage looks forward: it calls this 'the temporal grammar of anticipation without arrival'. A longing is not a 'visual vocabulary' either.

Concept

Two signals decide the blank.

Not X but Y is a correction: Y replaces X, so Y must differ from X in kind. X is decay, so the blank cannot mean decline.

The colon then explains Y: 'a visual vocabulary of state temporality'. The passage keeps up one metaphor of language: discourse, vocabulary, idiom, grammar. A word from that family completes it, and expression is that word.

The sentence before prepares the turn: 'To read them literally is to miss their symbolic resonance.' The disrepair is to be read as a message, and expression names a message.

Key facts

Not X but Y: Y corrects X, so Y cannot be a synonym of X.
Entropy: a gradual decline into disorder, a term from physics.
Default: a failure to meet an obligation, such as repaying a loan.
Nostalgia: a sentimental longing for the past.

Study next

Contrast signals in a cloze passage: not ... but, rather than, far fromWords for decline: entropy, atrophy, decay, attrition

Common traps

Choosing entropy because it matches the passage's scientific register, when it is a synonym of the decay the sentence rejects
Choosing nostalgia because the passage is about time, when its sense of time is anticipation, not longing for the past

Entropy as disorder is asked at 16 Sep 2025, 16:00, English Q.18, where 'minimize entropy in labor' is keyed as eliminating randomness and inefficiency in effort.

Blank (5) of this passage, English Q.13, turns on the same contrast: 'not stasis, but (5)'.

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.