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.
Read the following statements :
(a) A plane crashed on 15 January, 2009
(b) 155 passengers escaped, but the pilot lost his life.
(c) Jim, an onlooker, posted pictures on Facebook
- A.
(a) and (b) are correct, but (c) is incorrect
- B.
(c) is correct, but (a) and (b) are incorrect
- C.
(a) is correct, but (b) and (c) are incorrect
- D.
(a), (b) and (c) are all incorrect
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: C
In a fact-verification (true/false) passage question, each given statement is checked purely against what the passage explicitly states — a statement holds only when the text directly supports it, and fails when the text reports something different, even a small substituted detail such as a merged action or a reversed outcome.
Statement (a) — the crash date: the passage's opening line places the Hudson River crash precisely on 15 January 2009, so this statement matches the text.
Statement (b) — the pilot's fate: the passage reports that the pilot, the crew, and all 155 passengers escaped the crash safely, so the claim that the pilot lost his life contradicts the text.
Statement (c) — who posted what: the passage assigns tweeting about the crash to Jim specifically, and assigns taking and posting photos and videos to other bystanders on the street — the statement wrongly merges these two separate actions onto Jim.
Pairing (a) with (b) as both matching the passage overlooks that the text explicitly reports everyone, including the pilot, escaping safely.
Treating (c) alone as matching the passage overlooks that the tweeting action belongs to Jim while the photo-and-video-posting action belongs to other onlookers in the passage.
Rejecting all three statements overlooks that the crash date in statement (a) is stated directly in the passage's first line.
Since only statement (a) is fully supported by the passage while (b) and (c) each contradict or misattribute a specific detail, the combination in which (a) alone matches the passage is the one the text supports.