DIRECTIONS: Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

“On or about December 1910, human character changed,” the English novelist Virginia Woolf once wrote. It’s no exaggeration to say that human character in India changed equally dramatically between 2014 and 2019 as the number of active smartphones in the country quadrupled from 100 million to 400 million. 

Woolf, like many of her contemporaries in the early 20th century, was interested in how unprecedented economic and political forces such as industrialization and mass democracy, as well as newfangled communication technologies such as the telegraph and telephone, were altering human relations.

The smartphone in India is also sparking earthshaking transformations in private and public life. To hundreds of millions of young and poor Indians, the device offers their first -- and exhilaratingly simultaneous -- experience of a camera, computer, television, music player, video game, e-reader and the internet. The smartphone compresses a timeline of technological advances that in the West took centuries -- from the invention of letterpress printing to the advent of photography, radio, television, personal computer and modem – into just a few years.

Smartphone owners are constantly exposed to high volumes of information and disinformation -- both of which have a misleadingly uniform digital texture. One obvious result is the weakening of analytic ability -- the capacity to distinguish between the essential and the inessential, truth and untruth.

And when state education is poor, private education largely a con and competition fierce for even menial jobs, conditions are ripe not for revolution, as Marxists like to believe, but for a mass exodus into the smartphone’s screen. The sociopathic behavior enabled by smartphones is more unnerving if less visible. India, a largely conservative society, has rapidly become the third-largest market for online pornography, much of it extremely violent.

But the mounting addiction to fake news and images of sexual degradation are mere symptoms of a deeper and manifold crisis in India -- one provoked by a premature and rapid shift from linear text to screens, from critical thinking to passive consumption, and from writing to image making.