Reading Between 'Ostensibly' and 'In Practice': Judging Tone in a Section IA Passage
In a CUET Section IA practice set, a passage is followed by the question: 'Which of the following best describes the author's attitude towards the Kadalur catch quota?' The passage reads: 'When the Kadalur fishermen's cooperative adopted a catch quota in 2019, officials called it a model of community conservation, and three district reports repeated the phrase. The landing records were duly praised. Yet the ledgers kept by the cooperative's own accountant show that the quota was met every year mainly because fourteen boats stopped fishing altogether. Ostensibly the sea had been spared; in practice the fleet had simply shrunk.' Two students disagree. Meera chooses 'sceptical but not dismissive'; Arjun chooses 'openly hostile to the quota'. A third student picks 'approving' because the passage mentions official praise. Arjun defends his choice by saying that fishing quotas usually hurt poor fishermen, and that the author must be angry about the fourteen boats. The class must decide which option the passage actually supports, and why the other two fail.
1. Which option does the passage best support, and which two pieces of textual evidence decide the question?
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The supported option is 'sceptical but not dismissive'. Two pieces of evidence decide it. First, 'Yet the ledgers kept by the cooperative's own accountant show that the quota was met every year mainly because fourteen boats stopped fishing altogether' - the author does not dispute that the target was met; the objection is about why it was met. Second, the paired adverbs 'ostensibly' and 'in practice' separate the official claim from the recorded outcome without a single word of condemnation. 'Sceptical but not dismissive' fits that combination exactly: doubt about the interpretation, acceptance of the record. 'Openly hostile' fails because hostile writing would not concede the landing records, and it would go beyond the numbers to speak of harm to livelihoods. 'Approving' fails because approval needs no 'ostensibly' at all. The method being tested is matching an option to the strength of the vocabulary, not to the topic.
2. Explain what 'ostensibly' is doing in the sentence, and why the contrast with 'in practice' settles the tone question.
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'Ostensibly' means 'as claimed or apparently, but not necessarily in fact'. It concedes that the official description is what people say while withholding belief in it. Its partner 'in practice' then supplies the author's own reading: the sea was not spared, the fleet shrank. The pair creates a contrast between claim and evidence, so the sentence reports and corrects at the same time. That is precisely why the tone is sceptical rather than neutral, and certainly not angry - anger would need evaluative adjectives, and there are none. A workable exam shortcut: substitute 'supposedly' in the sentence and check whether it still makes sense. If it does, the correct option will usually contain words like 'apparently', 'questions' or 'doubts', while options built on 'clearly', 'admittedly', 'unfortunately' or 'condemns' will not survive the substitution.
3. Arjun's reasoning relies on general knowledge about quotas hurting fishermen. Explain why this loses the mark, and set out the procedure a candidate should use instead.
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Arjun has imported a real-world belief and then looked for an option that matched it. This is the commonest way to lose marks in Section IA. The passage never mentions poor fishermen, prices, hardship or anger; it discusses landing records and boat numbers. An inference item asks what follows from this text, so a statement that is true about the world can still be the wrong answer. The safer procedure: (1) underline the evaluative words - 'Yet', 'mainly because', 'ostensibly', 'in practice'; (2) eliminate any option that goes beyond those words in either direction, whether towards outrage or towards praise; (3) treat as suspect any option that needs information the passage withholds, even information you know to be correct. Arjun's own word 'usually' is the warning sign: it converts a fact about quotas in general into a claim about this passage, which the author never makes.