SSC CGL 2025 Tier-I · 23 September 2025, Shift 3 · English Comprehension · Question 8 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 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.

What should come in the place of blank number [1] ?

(a)inferiority
(b)preeminence
(c)orthodoxy
(d)intelligibility

Answer

Why

Correct — B. The sentence: 'such solutions often encode assumptions of temporal supremacy and civilizational [1] _______'.

The and joins two matching phrases, each an adjective plus a noun. The first is a claim to stand above others, so the blank must be a second claim of the same kind.

Preeminence, surpassing all others, is that claim. It fits solutions the North presents as universally applicable → option (b).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
inferiority — Inferiority runs against supremacy, its partner across the and. As the North's own claim it contradicts supremacy, and as the South's it needs a change of subject the sentence never marks.
(c)
orthodoxy — Orthodoxy means accepted doctrine. Civilizational orthodoxy would be a claim about belief, not rank, so it breaks the pairing with supremacy.
(d)
intelligibility — Intelligibility means being understandable. Nothing in the sentence is about being understood: the pair is about standing above others.

Concept

In a cloze on dense prose, find the word the blank is paired with and let the pairing choose. Here the pair is 'temporal supremacy and civilizational ___'.

The sentence opens with the Global North presenting its solutions as universally applicable, a claim of superiority. The assumptions those solutions encode continue it: supremacy in time, preeminence as a civilization.

The next sentence keeps the theme, with climate finance 'entrenching hierarchies of surveillance and dependence'. The passage is about hierarchy, not belief or clarity.

A reader could take inferiority as the status the North assumes for the South. The key reads the and as joining two claims the North makes about itself, the plainer reading of two parallel phrases.

Key facts

Preeminence: the fact of surpassing all others, superiority.
It is also spelt pre-eminence.
Supremacy and preeminence are near-synonyms: both mean standing above all others.
Orthodoxy: accepted or traditional doctrine.

Study next

Cloze blanks decided by a parallel phrase joined with andWords of rank: preeminence, supremacy, hegemony, primacy

Common traps

Choosing inferiority because the passage criticises the North. The blank names what the North assumes, not what the author thinks.
Picking orthodoxy because civilizational sounds like culture or belief, when the partner word supremacy is about rank.

Blank [2] of the same passage is English Q.9, keyed genealogy, and blanks [3] to [5] are English Q.10 to Q.12, keyed containment, co-optation and pageantry.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.

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.