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 7...

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 7 to 16.

         Attention is a finite civic resource repeatedly commandeered by commercial actors. Airports, sidewalks, and feeds are saturated with solicitations that commandeer our gaze, while self-styled disrupters prospect in the “private headspace” to monetize it. In such a regime, we have traded away silence, the felt condition of not being addressed. [I] Like clean air, absence of address enables thinking; its depletion makes agency brittle. Without norms, the market colonizes what used to be ambient refuge and calls it innovation.

         Against this drift, Matthew Crawford proposes imagining an attentional commons – shared conditions that shield people from incessant capture. If attention were treated as a commons, it would demand stewardship rather than perpetual extraction. This reframing invites governance: constraints on unsolicited displays, default opt-outs, and duties of care for those who engineer attention-traps. [II] When we honor silence as infrastructure, we make room for thinking together, not merely scrolling alone, and we civilize the terms on which persuasion meets the passerby.

        Crawford traces the genealogy of distraction to the auctioning of public vistas and the legitimation of constant address; he first mapped this in “How We Lost Our Attention.” [III] His argument is less nostalgia than institutional design: without limits, the loudest bidder captures the square. At the Virginia Festival of the Book (March 18, Charlottesville), he will discuss these stakes with media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan, connecting everyday bombardment with the ethics of designing environments fit for democratic attention.

        Practical implications follow. Cities can expand ad-free corridors and regulate attention-harvesting in transit; schools and libraries can prioritize quiet zones; platform defaults can privilege consent over capture. Registration remains free for the evening event, though seats are limited, and back issues of “Minding Our Minds” are modestly priced. [IV] None of this abolishes persuasion; it merely rebalances it so citizens can refuse address without penalty – the precondition for judgment rather than frictionless compliance.

(Adapted from The Hedgehog Review, “Toward an Attentional Commons,” and Matthew Crawford’s commentary)

Question 7. The word monetize in paragraph 1 mostly means ______.

A. socially performative                                B. painfully obsolete

C. commercially exploitable                                D. marginally lawful