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 1...

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 17 to 24.

        Cancel culture, some argue, thrives where intellectual liberty ought to be most robust: newsrooms and campuses. An insidious orthodoxy has formed, in which deviating from sanctioned narratives incurs swift social sanction. Under banners like social justice or intersectionality, critics contend, procedure yields to sentiment, and reputations become collateral. Those who display ideological heterodoxy risk professional censure as informal tribunals on social media displace deliberation. If speech is reclassified as harm, the incentive is to pre-empt debate rather than to endure it.

        Proponents of open discourse distinguish accountability from cancellation: the former allows rebuttal; the latter forecloses it. Writers such as Thomas Chatterton Williams describe a stifling climate in which employment is targeted to “make an example.” The Harper’s “Letter on Justice and Open Debate” catalogued recurrent tactics: editors dismissed after controversial pieces, books withdrawn for “inauthenticity,” reporters barred from certain topics, professors investigated for quoting literature, researchers fired, and leaders ousted for clumsy missteps.

        Many trace the genealogy of this censorious turn to academia. Campus safetyism – the expectation of insulation from disquieting ideas – expanded via trigger warnings and de-platforming demands. Over time, graduates exported these norms into media, tech firms, and cultural institutions; as Andrew Sullivan quipped, “we all live on campus now.” In this migration, due process waned while risk-averse bureaucracies multiplied, rewarding denunciation over disagreement and compliance over curiosity. In effect, institutional culture absorbed undergraduate sensibilities wholesale.

        Against this drift, dissenters prescribe courage and procedural fairness. Bari Weiss and others argue that pluralism requires tolerating error, not ritual humiliation. If enough people refuse to acquiesce, they may reverse the drift toward soft authoritarianism. Williams frames the choice starkly: integrity versus expediency. The remedy is less a purge than a recommitment – to viewpoint diversity, charitably framed criticism, and norms that separate disagreement from punishment. Without such guardrails, fear corrodes inquiry; with them, argument becomes a civic habit again.

(Adapted from James G. Martin Center, “Where Did Cancel Culture Come From?”, 2020; Bari Weiss remarks; Harper’s “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” 2020)

Question 17. The word stifling in paragraph 2 can be best replaced by ______.

A. oppressive                B. suffocating                        C. confining                        D. Inhibitive