SSC CGL 2025 Tier-I · 20 September 2025, Shift 1 · English Comprehension · Question 9 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 (1)?

(a)stagnant
(b)regressive
(c)disjunctive
(d)sovereign

Answer

Why

Correct — C. The blank describes a temporality in which the present is neither a continuity of the past nor a stable projection of the future.

A present cut off from both past and future is disconnected. Disjunctive means not connected, separated.

The next sentence confirms it: the infrastructures are affective indexes of temporal rupture. A rupture is a break → option (c).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
stagnant — Stagnant means not moving or changing, and the passage rules that out: the built environment articulates not stasis. Stagnation would also make the present a continuity of the past.
(b)
regressive — Regressive means moving back to an earlier or worse state. The passage denies decline: the disrepair is not decay, and the sites constitute not failure.
(d)
sovereign — Sovereign means holding supreme power, or independent, of a state. It says nothing about how present, past and future connect, which is what the in-which clause defines.

Concept

A cloze blank is decided by what the surrounding sentence says about the missing word. Here the blank is an adjective on temporality, and the clause after it defines that temporality.

The clause uses neither ... nor: the present is neither a continuity of the past nor a stable projection of the future. It is cut off on both sides.

The passage keeps returning to breaks: a schizochronic condition, temporal rupture, arrested developments. Disjunctive names that disconnection.

Stagnant is the strongest lure, because half-finished flyovers look stuck. The passage's own verdict is that they articulate not stasis, but a condition where motion exists without direction, so a stuck present is the reading it rules out.

Key facts

Disjunctive means not connected, separated.
Neither ... nor denies both of two possibilities at once.
Stagnant means not flowing, moving or developing.

Study next

Adjectives for broken continuity: fragmented, discontinuous and fracturedContrast signals in cloze passages: rather, not ... but, neither ... nor

Common traps

Picking stagnant because half-finished flyovers look stuck, when the passage says not stasis
Choosing regressive from the images of disrepair, when the passage says the disrepair is not decay

Blanks (2) to (5) of this passage are 20 Sep 2025, 09:00, English Q.10 to Q.13, keyed semiotics, materializes, expression and kinesis.

A passage cloze in the same format is 22 Sep 2025, 09:00, English Q.9: a lexicon of managerial (1) _____, keyed lubricants.

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.