SSC CGL 2025 Tier-I · 24 September 2025, Shift 2 · English Comprehension · Question 11 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 [4]?

(a)ablation
(b)concretization
(c)immanence
(d)retrieval

Answer

Why

Correct — A. The sentence reads: 'Such a politics necessitates the [4] _______ of normativity as a structuring logic of embodiment.'

The next sentence restates the blank: 'Only through its unmaking can a post-identitarian ethics of becoming be envisioned'. Its is normativity, so the blank must name a removal.

Ablation means removal, as in the surgical removal of tissue → option (a).

Why the others are wrong

(b)
concretization — Concretization means making something concrete or solid. Concretizing normativity would firm it up, the reverse of the unmaking the next sentence calls for.
(c)
immanence — Immanence means being inherent, existing within. It names a state, not an act, and 'the immanence of normativity' would keep normativity built in, against its unmaking.
(d)
retrieval — Retrieval means getting something back. Recovering normativity runs against its unmaking, and the passage's last sentence rejects that stance outright: 'freedom is not recuperative'.

Concept

A cloze blank can be settled by the sentence after it. Here Only through its unmaking restates blank [4] in plain words.

The pronoun its points back to normativity, so whatever fills [4] must mean unmaking or removal.

With that fixed, the options sort by direction: ablation removes, concretization firms up, retrieval brings back, and immanence only describes a state.

Ablation is a technical word in medicine, for the removal of body tissue, and in engineering, for material worn away from a surface such as a heat shield. You need neither: the pronoun its in the next sentence settles the blank.

Key facts

Ablation: removal, especially the surgical removal of body tissue.
Concretization: making something concrete, real or specific.
Immanence: the quality of existing or operating within something.
Retrieval: the act of getting something back.

Study next

Pronoun reference as a cloze clue: it, its, this and such pointing back to a blankRemoval vocabulary: ablation, excision, extirpation, erasureImmanent, imminent and eminent

Common traps

Choosing immanence because it sounds like the passage's theory register. Register decides nothing here, and the next sentence asks for an unmaking.
Missing that its in 'its unmaking' is normativity, which is what makes the next sentence restate the blank.

Another passage in the same abstract register is set at 23 Sep 2025, 09:00, English Q.8 to Q.12. Its blank [4], English Q.11, is also settled by the words around it, 'excessive and unlocatable', keyed incalculable.

Blanks [3] and [5] of this passage are English Q.10 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.