Read the passage carefully and then answer the questions that follow:

Read the passage carefully and then answer the questions that follow:

Not unlike drugs or alcohol, the television experience allows the participant to blot out the real world and enter into a pleasurable and passive mental state. The worries and anxieties of reality are as effectively deferred by becoming absorbed in a television program as by going on a “trip” induced by drugs or alcohol. And just as alcoholics are only inchoately aware of their addiction, feeling that they control their drinking more than they really do (“I can cut it out any time I want — I just like to have three or four drinks before dinner”), people similarly overestimate their control over television watching. Even as they put off other activities to spend hour after hour watching television, they feel they could easily resume living in a different, less passive style. But somehow or the other while the television set is present in their homes, the click doesn’t sound. With television pleasures available, those other experiences seem less attractive, more difficult somehow. A heavy viewer (a college English instructor) observes: “I find television almost irresistible. When the set is on, I cannot ignore it. I can’t turn it off. I feel sapped, will-less, enervated. As I reach out to turn off the set, the strength goes out of my arms. So I sit there for hours and hours.” The self-confessed television addict often feels he “ought” to do other things — but the fact that he doesn’t read and doesn’t plant his garden or sew or crochet or play games or have conversations means that those activities are no longer as desirable as television viewing. In a way a heavy viewer’s life is as imbalanced by his television “habit” as a drug addict’s or an alcoholic’s. He is living in a holding pattern, as it were, passing up the activities that lead to growth or development or a sense of accomplishment. This is one reason people talk about their television viewing so ruefully, so apologetically.They are aware that it is an unproductive experience, that almost any other endeavour is more worthwhile by any human measure. Finally it is the adverse effect of television viewing on the lives of so many people that defines it as a serious addiction. The television habit distorts the sense of time. It renders other experiences vague and curiously unreal while taking on a greater reality for itself. It weakens relationships by reducing and sometimes eliminating normal opportunities for talking, for communicating. And yet television does not satisfy, else why would the viewer continue to watch hour after hour, day after day? “The measure of health,” writes Lawrence Kubie, “is flexibility and especially the freedom to cease when sated.” But the television viewer can never be sated with his television experiences — they do not provide the true nourishment that satiation requires — and thus he finds that he cannot stop watching.

(a) Answer the following questions by choosing the correct option — (1), (2) or (3)

(i) The experience of watching TV is similar to that of consuming drugs as both (1) give pleasure (2) create anxieties (3) create nearness to reality

(ii) TV addicts wrongly think that (1) They can control their habit (2) they have no control on their addiction (3) their normal life is over

(iii) TV addicts find it difficult to (1) sit and watch TV for hours (2) be engrossed in a show on TV (3) switch off the TV

(iv) TV viewing is more attractive to the addict than (1) drugs (2) reading (3) alcohol

(v) Because of one’s addiction to TV, one can become quite (1) unproductive (2) active (3) worthwhile

(b) State whether the following statements are True or False:

(i) The experience of watching TV makes a person become passive.

(ii) A TV addict lives in the real world.

(iii) Watching TV for long hours makes people conscious of real life problems.

(iv) People who get addicted to watching TV for long hours think they’ll be able to switch it off whenever they want to.

(v) A compulsive viewer thinks he can resume a more active life whenever he wishes to and he is able to do so.

(vi) Alcoholics and TV viewers lead similar lives.

(vii) To a TV addict playing games, reading or planting his garden is equally desirable.

(viii) A habit turns into a serious addiction when it starts having a negative impact on a person’s life.

(ix) An addict enjoys the unreal world more than the real world.

(x) In spite of being aware of the hold of their addiction on their lives, addicts are not able to give it up

(c) Match the words in Column A (taken from the passage) Column B.