A person gets power

Concept: A passage-based sentence-completion item is settled by the passage's own words, not by general knowledge or by which phrase sounds most agreeable. The method is to find the one sentence in which the passage states the relation named in the stem, and then read the completion straight out of that sentence; a phrase that merely appears somewhere in the passage does not qualify unless it stands in that stated relation.

Application: The stem asserts that a person gets power and asks what that power comes from. The passage opens by quoting James Madison: “A people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with power that knowledge gives.” That sentence states the relation directly — the power in question is the power that knowledge gives — so the completion the passage supports is “by acquiring knowledge”. The Hindi rendering of the same line, “ज्ञान से प्राप्त शक्ति”, says the same thing.

Contrast: how the remaining phrases actually sit in the passage —

• “from the Official Secrets Act, 1923” — the passage describes this Act as “a convenient smokescreen to deny members of the public access to information”. In the passage it is the instrument that withholds information, so it is not what the passage says supplies a person with power.

• “through openness” — the passage says that in a democracy in which people govern themselves “it is necessary to have more openness”. That is a prescription about how public functioning should be conducted; the passage presents openness as the condition that makes information reachable, not as the thing Madison's sentence says gives power.

• “by denying public information” — this restates the practice the passage criticises, namely public functioning traditionally “shrouded in secrecy” under the Official Secrets Act regime. The passage offers it as the problem the right to information is meant to end, so it cannot complete a sentence about how power is gained.

Cross-check: the rest of the passage runs the same way. The right to information is called “a major step forward” precisely because “it enables citizens to participate fully in the decision-making process that affects their lives so profoundly” — it is the citizen's access to information, and so to knowledge, that converts a governed person into a governor. Both the opening quotation and the closing argument therefore point to the same completion: a person gets power by acquiring knowledge.