SSC CGL 2025 Tier-I · 20 September 2025, Shift 1 · English Comprehension · Question 13 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 (5)?

(a)inertia
(b)kinesis
(c)exhaustion
(d)permanence

Answer

Why

Correct — B. The blank sits in a contrast: 'the postcolonial built environment articulates not stasis, but (5) ___'. Stasis is standing still, so the blank must name movement.

The dash then defines it: 'a condition where motion exists without direction'.

Kinesis means movement. In biology it names movement in response to a stimulus with no set direction, which matches the gloss → option (b).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
inertia — Inertia in everyday use is a tendency to stay unchanged or do nothing. That sits close to stasis, the very word 'not stasis, but' rejects.
(c)
exhaustion — Exhaustion means being worn out or used up, when motion has run down. The gloss after the dash says the reverse: 'motion exists'.
(d)
permanence — Permanence means lasting without change, which describes stasis rather than its opposite. The gloss is about motion and 'perpetual incompletion', not fixity.

Concept

Stasis is a state of no movement or change, from the Greek for 'standing'. Kinesis is its opposite, from the Greek for 'movement', the root also behind kinetic.

The passage pairs them with not X, but Y, so the blank is the opposite of stasis.

The dash adds the twist, motion 'without direction'. That is the passage's argument in one word: things keep moving and never arrive, 'anticipation without arrival'.

Blank (4), English Q.12, is built the same way: 'not decay but (4) ___' followed by a colon gloss. The method carries over: name what is rejected, then match the gloss.

Key facts

Stasis: a state in which there is no movement or change.
Kinesis means movement. In biology it is movement in response to a stimulus without a set direction, unlike taxis, which is directed.
Inertia: in everyday use, a tendency to do nothing or remain unchanged.
Kinetic comes from the same Greek root, kinein, 'to move'.

Study next

Greek antonym pairs: stasis and kinesis, static and kineticPhysics words used figuratively: inertia, entropy, momentumNot X, but Y as a signal that the blank is an antonym

Common traps

Choosing inertia because it is a physics word tied to motion, when in general use it means staying unchanged
Choosing permanence to echo 'perpetual', when perpetual here describes incompletion that never ends, not a fixed state

Inertia in its everyday sense, resistance to change, is the object of the blank at 12 Sep 2025, 12:30, English Q.9: 'Nothing short of a paradigm shift will ___ the entrenched bureaucratic inertia', keyed dislodge.

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.