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.
Ordinary people suddenly became journalists means :
- A.
they started posting news-bits, pictures, and videos on social media
- B.
they headed towards media houses to seek employment
- C.
they started contacting Jim to know the details
- D.
they left the jobs where they were employed
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: A
Concept: In literal reading comprehension, a phrase describing someone's sudden change of role ("suddenly became ...") is explained by finding the exact action the passage narrates immediately around that phrase — the correct option must be a direct paraphrase of what the text says people actually DID, not an inference about their profession, income, or personal contacts.
Application: The passage narrates other people on the street taking photos and videos with their phones and posting them online right where the phrase appears. The line right after this generalises it: photos, videos, and tweets from ordinary people at the scene of dramatic events now provide the words and images used to describe events in the news. So the phrase is the passage's own description of ordinary people posting news-bits, pictures, and videos on social media — the act of taking and sharing photos, videos, and tweets about an unfolding event.
Cross-check: Elsewhere the passage shows Haiti's eyewitnesses posting photos and accounts on social media, and people phoning an existing radio programme to ask about relatives; millions elsewhere only watched footage of the Russian meteor rather than posting it themselves. None of these later examples describes anyone travelling to seek a media job or changing employer — and the passage's one mention of contacting Jim is a separate, earlier reaction to his tweet, distinct from the phrase's own meaning generalised in the very next paragraph.