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 2...

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 28 to 35.

        The race toward scalable quantum computing has entered a pivotal inflection, with Microsoft, Google, and IBM pursuing divergent routes toward fault tolerance. Microsoft touts Majorana-based hardware; Google advances error-corrected scaling; IBM maintains a disciplined roadmap. While optimism grows that practicality may arrive sooner than expected, skepticism persists. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has warned that commercially meaningful use could still be decades away, a sobering reminder that exuberant claims must withstand empirical scrutiny and reproducibility, not merely headline-grabbing prototypes and carefully curated demonstrations.

        Microsoft’s Majorana 1 reframes the problem as a hardware-native solution: topological structures integrate exotic states to stabilize qubits and suppress noise. Satya Nadella heralded “a new state of matter” and novel “topoconductors,” foregrounding materials engineering over incremental patchwork. Chetan Nayak argues that rethinking the quantum transistor clarifies a viable route to scale. By embedding fault tolerance in hardware, Microsoft claims the path to a million-qubit processor is within reach. Proponents insist this reduces overheads demanded by conventional error correction.

        Google’s Willow chip targets the field’s thirty-year nemesis – errors that balloon with size – by architecting error correction that improves as more qubits are added. The company reports two breakthroughs: first, an exponential suppression of error with scale; second, a benchmark completed in under five minutes that a top supercomputer would need an estimated 10 septillion years to emulate. If validated independently, this implies not mere incrementalism but a qualitative shift: scaling ceases to be punitive and begins to be self-ameliorating.

        IBM, long invested in superconducting transmon qubits, frames quantum as an engineering marathon rather than a speculative moonshot. Arvind Krishna notes a decade-plus of steady investment and a roadmap disciplined by error-correction milestones, software stacks, and use-case curation. In this telling, quantum advantage is not a singular eureka but the compound interest of systems integration. Together, these approaches suggest a heterogeneous future where materials science, architecture, and control theory co-evolve rather than converge on a single canonical design.

(Adapted from Forbes: “Recent Breakthroughs Accelerate the Race for Quantum Computing,” Mar 9, 2025)

Question 28. The word pivotal in paragraph 1 can be best replaced by ______?

A. crucial                B. peripheral                        C. tentative                        D. ornamental