SSC CGL 2025 Tier-I · 24 September 2025, Shift 2 · English Comprehension · Question 10 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:
To conceive of gender as ontologically prior or naturally originary is to misrecognize its status as a [1] _______, a semiotic and performative topology whose coherence is secured only through its reiteration across spatial, legal, and psychic apparatuses. Within this regime, embodiment is not merely lived but mediated—filtered through hermeneutic technologies that valorize some corporealities while rendering others abject, deviant, or structurally unintelligible. The state, in tandem with biomedical epistemes and juridico-political grammars, exercises a necropolitical calibration of life itself—where recognition is not a right but a [2] _______, allocated via matrices of intelligibility that are historically contingent and politically fungible. This diposit if renders gender a function of discursive legibility rather than biological inevitability. Resistance, when funneled through these grammars, risks becoming complicit in the very structures it seeks to subvert. Hence, the radical task is not merely to “expand” recognition but to effect a [3] _______ of recognition’s ontological architecture. This entails refusing the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion that liberal frameworks offer and instead exposing their constitutive foreclosure of alterity. Such a politics necessitates the [4] _______ of normativity as a structuring logic of embodiment. Only through its unmaking can a post-identitarian ethics of becoming be envisioned—one that privileges contingency over coherence, opacity over transparency, and relational indeterminacy over categorical fixity. In this schema, freedom is not recuperative but [5] _______—a rupture from taxonomic legibility, a departure from the logocentric compulsion to be known.

What should come in the place of blank number [3]?

(a)reiteration
(b)destitution
(c)emancipation
(d)interpolation

Answer

Why

Correct — B. The sentence reads: 'Hence, the radical task is not merely to “expand” recognition but to effect a [3] _______ of recognition’s ontological architecture.'

Hence points back: resistance funneled through these grammars 'risks becoming complicit in the very structures it seeks to subvert'. So the task must go beyond expanding recognition, and the blank must name an undoing of its architecture.

Destitution means deprivation, a stripping-away. A destitution of that architecture strips it down instead of extending it → option (b).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
reiteration — Reiteration is what the passage says holds the structure together: its coherence 'is secured only through its reiteration'. Effecting a reiteration would repeat and reinforce the architecture the task means to undo.
(c)
emancipation — Emancipation means setting free. With of, an emancipation of the architecture would set the architecture itself free; freeing people from it would need from. The sentence wants the structure undone.
(d)
interpolation — Interpolation means inserting something, as words into a text. Inserting into the architecture adds to it, which is close to the 'expand' that the sentence calls not enough.

Concept

In dense theory prose, the logic words carry the answer even when the vocabulary does not.

Hence ties the sentence to the warning about complicity just before it. Not merely ... but then sets the blank beyond expanding recognition, and the quotation marks around 'expand' show the writer keeping a distance from that word.

So the blank needs an act of undoing. Of the four options, only destitution points that way.

In everyday English destitution means extreme poverty, and that sense makes the option look absurd here. The passage uses its wider sense, deprivation or a stripping-away, which suits a sentence about unmaking a structure.

Key facts

Destitution: extreme poverty, and more widely deprivation or lack.
Destitute comes from Latin destituere, 'to abandon, forsake'.
Reiteration: the act of repeating something already said or done.
Interpolation: the insertion of something, such as words, into a text or series.

Study next

Logic words in cloze passages: hence, not merely ... but, only throughWords with an everyday and a wider sense: destitution, ablation, apophaticInterpolation (insertion) and interpellation (formal questioning)

Common traps

Rejecting destitution because you know it only as poverty. The passage uses its sense of deprivation, an undoing.
Choosing reiteration because the passage has already used it. There it names what holds the structure together, the opposite of this task.

Destitution is also the keyed word at 23 Sep 2025, 09:00, English Q.10, where the passage glosses the blank as 'the unworking of systems, the destitution of legibility'.

Blanks [4] and [5] of this passage are English Q.11 and Q.12.

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:
To conceive of gender as ontologically prior or naturally originary is to misrecognize its status as a [1] _______, a semiotic and performative topology whose coherence is secured only through its reiteration across spatial, legal, and psychic apparatuses. Within this regime, embodiment is not merely lived but mediated—filtered through hermeneutic technologies that valorize some corporealities while rendering others abject, deviant, or structurally unintelligible. The state, in tandem with biomedical epistemes and juridico-political grammars, exercises a necropolitical calibration of life itself—where recognition is not a right but a [2] _______, allocated via matrices of intelligibility that are historically contingent and politically fungible. This diposit if renders gender a function of discursive legibility rather than biological inevitability. Resistance, when funneled through these grammars, risks becoming complicit in the very structures it seeks to subvert. Hence, the radical task is not merely to “expand” recognition but to effect a [3] _______ of recognition’s ontological architecture. This entails refusing the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion that liberal frameworks offer and instead exposing their constitutive foreclosure of alterity. Such a politics necessitates the [4] _______ of normativity as a structuring logic of embodiment. Only through its unmaking can a post-identitarian ethics of becoming be envisioned—one that privileges contingency over coherence, opacity over transparency, and relational indeterminacy over categorical fixity. In this schema, freedom is not recuperative but [5] _______—a rupture from taxonomic legibility, a departure from the logocentric compulsion to be known.