Evaluate how effective the final sentence is as a conclusion to the passage.

Somewhere between the first smartphone and the thousandth notification, we quietly abolished boredom. The empty minutes that once belonged to us (on the bus, in the queue, in the dull fortnight of the summer holidays) have been annexed by screens that promise, and rarely deliver, something better. We call this progress. But boredom was never merely a gap to be filled; it was the soil in which attention grew. A child with nothing to do invents a game; an adult with nothing to do notices, for once, the shape of their own thoughts. If we strip away every idle moment, we may find that we have not so much saved time as sold it: exchanged the slow, private work of imagination for a stream of other people's noise.

Answer and explanation

Correct answer: C. Saved time has a hidden cost, like a bad sale

  1. Step 1: 'Saved' and 'sold' belong to the language of money.
  2. Step 2: The writer suggests the trade-off cost us imagination, summing up the argument with a vivid contrast to 'slow, private work'.
Answer
Saved time has a hidden cost, like a bad sale.
Why not the others: It is ineffective because it introduces a completely new subject: it develops the earlier idea. It is effective only because it uses a question: there is no question. It is ineffective because it repeats the first sentence word for word: it does not repeat the first sentence.

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