Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow : On 15…
2024
Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow :
On 15 January 2009, several interesting things happened. A plane crash landed into the Hudson River, right in the middle of New York City. The pilot, crew and 155 passengers escaped safely. But then, something else happened... Jim was nearby and watched the event happen. He immediately tweeted that he had just seen a plane crash in the Hudson. From there the news spread quickly. People contacted him immediately and asked him what was happening, and other people on the street took photos and videos with their phones and posted them online. Ordinary people suddenly became journalists. It was 15 minutes before the news broke on official news channels.
Photos, videos and tweets from ordinary people at the scene of dramatic events now provide the words and images that describe events in the news. When a meteor exploded over a Russian city in 2013, millions of people around the world watched videos and photos of the event on Facebook and YouTube. Social media can also save lives. In January 2010, an earthquake hit the Caribbean island of Haiti. The government said that there had been an earthquake, but they didn’t give many details at first. Meanwhile, people living in the disaster area were posting photos and eye witness accounts on Twitter and Facebook and telling the world that it was an emergency and houses were collapsing. A local radio presenter used this information to help people find family members, and people even phoned his program to ask if their relatives were safe.
News travels fast on social media, but false stories spread just as quickly as the truth. Some of these “facts” are erroneous, others are deliberate hoaxes. Hoaxes remind us that not everything people post and publish is reliable. But social media can change our lives for the better.
News on social media:
- A.
are reliable
- B.
travel fast
- C.
are deliberate hoaxes
- D.
are insignificant
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: B
Concept: In a reading-comprehension fill-in-the-blank question, the correct completion must be an explicit statement made in the passage itself — not an inference, an exaggeration, or a detail the passage actually contradicts. The task is to locate the sentence in the passage that states the fact being tested and match the blank to its exact meaning.
Application: The third paragraph opens with: “News travels fast on social media, but false stories spread just as quickly as the truth.” This sentence directly states the speed of news on social media. The first paragraph also demonstrates this: Jim's tweet about the Hudson River plane crash spread so quickly that ordinary people had photos and videos online well before official news channels broke the story 15 minutes later. This is exactly what the sentence “News on social media: ___” is testing — how fast news spreads on these platforms.
Cross-check (why the other options fail):
“Are reliable” is contradicted by the passage, which states that false stories and deliberate hoaxes spread just as quickly as the truth — the opposite of a claim that everything posted is reliable.
“Are deliberate hoaxes” over-generalises one detail: the passage says only some stories are hoaxes, not that social media news in general consists of hoaxes.
“Are insignificant” is contradicted by the Haiti earthquake example, where a radio presenter used eyewitness posts to help people find family members, and listeners phoned in to check on their relatives’ safety — a clearly significant use of social media news.
Since only the speed of news spread is explicitly and consistently supported across the whole passage, the sentence is correctly completed as “News on social media: travel fast.”