Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 3...

Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 31 to 40.

        Synthetic media has collapsed easy distinctions between capture and fabrication, unsettling habits of trust. In response, watermarking proposes “invisible fingerprints” that travel with AI outputs, enabling automated checks where human discernment falters. [I] Advocates argue that credibility can be architected, not merely assumed: if verification accompanies content, audiences regain footing. Yet sceptics warn that machine legibility may obscure human accountability, especially when systems are proprietary or inscrutable. The new contest, therefore, is less about dazzling creation than about restoring epistemic guardrails at scale.

        Standards widen the lens. Provenance frameworks such as C2PA aim to encode the chain of custody, linking artifacts to verifiable histories: who made what, using which tools, and how edits accumulated. [II] Rather than banning synthetic creativity, this approach distinguishes depiction from deception by surfacing origins. If metadata is cryptographically signed and tamper-evident, platforms can label, rank, or gate distribution accordingly. However, standard-setting is political: which institutions arbitrate protocols, and how transparency trades against privacy, safety, and creators’ legitimate anonymity in sensitive contexts?

        Watermarking is no panacea. Adversaries may strip signals, compress away markers, or forge look-alikes; rogue models will simply skip compliance. If marks are uneven, contested, or fragile, trust mechanisms risk becoming theatre: visible ritual without dependable protection. [III] Hence the call for multilayered defence  –  watermarking plus classifiers, policy enforcement, and public literacy  –  so that failure in one layer is caught by another. Within this fabric, the invisible tag helps honest actors declare origins while preserving ordinary user experience.

        Adoption is a cultural as much as a technical project. Tooling must expose provenance in familiar surfaces, with defaults that make checks frictionless and predictable. [IV] Pilots, audits, and cross-sector coalitions can refine thresholds, while appeal rights and human override sustain legitimacy. If audiences expect authenticity cues as they expect padlocks in browsers, vigilance becomes ambient rather than exhausting. In the long run, institutions that embed contestability alongside efficiency are likelier to preserve both creative abundance and civic trust.

(Adapted from Hetvi Gandhi, “Synthetic Media Watermarking and Authenticity Standards,” Reflections, Aug. 23, 2025)

Question 31. According to paragraph 1, ______ restores footing when human discernment falters.

A. watermarking that travels with content to enable automated checking

B. prohibitions on all synthetic media regardless of artistic or educational context

C. newsroom memoranda reminding audiences to simply trust official communications

D. influencer endorsements guaranteeing that viral clips are genuine by reputation

Question 32. The word frictionless in paragraph 4 mostly means ______.

A. effortlessly smooth                                B. cautiously tentative

C. deliberately opaque                                D. marginally abrasive

Question 33. Which of the following best summarises paragraph 2?

A. Provenance standards expose origins through cryptographic records while navigating political choices about governance, privacy, and who sets the rules for visibility at scale.

B. Banning synthetic media entirely is the only workable method for ensuring provenance, because standards inevitably erase anonymity and collapse all creative freedoms.

C. Watermarking replaces every editorial decision, allowing platforms to abandon moderation since signatures automatically prevent deceptive edits across all distribution channels.

D. Standards eliminate the need for metadata; creators simply declare authenticity verbally, and platforms confirm manually without cryptography or institutional participation.

Question 34. What governance features are emphasised to legitimise authenticity ecosystems?

A. auditable protocols, signed metadata, transparent labelling, and avenues for appeal, consistently

B. secretive committees, unpublished criteria, unverifiable hashes, and irreversible rankings by default

C. profit-maximising algorithms, private deals, coercive disclosure, and permanent identifiers for everyone

D. ad hoc checklists, oral promises, sporadic reviews, and selective exemptions for major advertisers

Question 35. What limitation of watermarking does paragraph 3 highlight?

A. skilled attackers can strip, corrupt, or imitate embedded signals

B. human editors always misread visible labels on platforms

C. creators cannot legally publish signed provenance metadata

D. compression invariably strengthens the robustness of signatures

Question 36. The phrase invisible tag in paragraph 3 refers to ______.

A. privacy                 B. watermarks                C. forgery                D. auditors

Question 37. Which of the following best paraphrases the underlined sentence in paragraph 3?

If marks are uneven, contested, or fragile, trust mechanisms risk becoming theatre: visible ritual without dependable protection.

A. If provenance signals achieve universal robustness and enforcement, public confidence predictably declines as reliable mechanisms engender complacency and inadvertently incentivize evasion.

B. Provided authentication markers remain irregular and contested, protective efficacy paradoxically improves because ritualized protocols reassure users despite underlying signal brittleness.

C. Should authentication signals exhibit irregular implementation or technical brittleness, verification infrastructures devolve into performative ceremonialism projecting legitimacy superficially without substantive safeguards.

D. As tagging systems strengthen technically, theatrical dimensions replace substantive function, making verification ceremonies prominent while materially diminishing actual protective capacity.

Question 38. Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?

A. Political control over standards is irrelevant to legitimacy; technical cryptography alone suffices to deliver broad civic trust across cultures and industries indefinitely.

B. Universal removal of synthetic media is necessary, since provenance cues cannot coexist with creative innovation without destroying privacy and shrinking legitimate expressive possibilities.

C. Audiences prefer exhausting vigilance; therefore, platforms should hide provenance, ensuring users practise constant suspicion instead of relying on ambient, well-designed authenticity cues.

D. A layered approach combining standards, tooling, policy, and literacy likely outperforms single-point fixes, because diverse failure modes demand overlapping safeguards and routes for contestation.

Question 39. Where in the passage does the following sentence best fit?

This approach aims to match the velocity of deception with equally rapid verification at the moment of exposure.

A. [I]                        B. [II]                                C. [III]                        D. [IV]

Question 40. Which of the following best summarises the passage?

A. Authenticity mechanisms chiefly restrict creativity, so societies should abandon standards work and let market competition decide which content appears trustworthy to audiences.

B. Signatures alone solve misinformation, making cultural adoption unnecessary and rendering oversight, audits, and appeals redundant across all major platforms globally.

C. Watermarking and provenance standards can bolster trust, but only as part of multilayered governance that balances robustness, usability, privacy, and political legitimacy.

D. Watermarking is strictly cosmetic; attempts to expose origins inevitably fail, and the only remaining solution is permanent scepticism and continual manual verification everywhere.