Question:
A TED talk (the acronym stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design) is one of the routes to academic stardom that didn't exist a decade ago. (The 30th anniversary celebration aside, curators only began posting fame-making free online videos in 2006.) Although TED plays an inordinate role in setting the tone for how ideas are conveyed, not only because of the reach of its videos but also through spinoffs like regional "TEDx" events and the TED Radio Hour, one of the few places nonpolicy intellectuals get substantial on-air time, it's just one of a number of platforms that are changing the ecology of academic celebrity. These include similar ideas-in-nuggets conclaves, such as the Aspen Ideas Festival and PopTech, along with huge online courses and, yes, still, blogs. These new, or at least newish, forms are upending traditional hierarchies of academic visibility and helping to change which ideas gain purchase in the public discourse.
In a famous essay, "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," first published in the early 90s, the literary scholar Stanley Fish wrote that "the flourishing of the lecture circuit has brought with it new sources of extra income ... [and] an ever-growing list of stages on which to showcase one's talents, and geometric increase in the availability of the commodities for which academics yearn, attention, applause, fame, and ultimately, adulation of a kind usually reserved for the icons of popular culture." Fish was Exhibit A among professors taking advantage of such trends, and his trailblazing as a lit-crit celebrity inspired the dapper, globe-trotting lit-theory operator Morris Zapp, a character in David Lodge's academic satire Small World. But the world Fish was describing, where no one could live-tweet the lectures, let alone post the talks for worldwide distribution, now seems sepia-toned. "If David Lodge's Morris Zapp were alive and kicking today," observes John Holbo, an associate professor of philosophy at the National University of Singapore, and blogger at Crooked Timber and the Valve, "he'd be giving a TED talk, not an MLA talk. Which is to say: He wouldn't be doing Theory. He probably wouldn't be in an English department."
Q72. The phrase "sepia-toned" implies:
A TED talk (the acronym stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design) is one of the routes to academic stardom that didn't exist a decade ago. (The 30th anniversary celebration aside, curators only began posting fame-making free online videos in 2006.) Although TED plays an inordinate role in setting the tone for how ideas are conveyed, not only because of the reach of its videos but also through spinoffs like regional "TEDx" events and the TED Radio Hour, one of the few places nonpolicy intellectuals get substantial on-air time, it's just one of a number of platforms that are changing the ecology of academic celebrity. These include similar ideas-in-nuggets conclaves, such as the Aspen Ideas Festival and PopTech, along with huge online courses and, yes, still, blogs. These new, or at least newish, forms are upending traditional hierarchies of academic visibility and helping to change which ideas gain purchase in the public discourse.
In a famous essay, "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," first published in the early 90s, the literary scholar Stanley Fish wrote that "the flourishing of the lecture circuit has brought with it new sources of extra income ... [and] an ever-growing list of stages on which to showcase one's talents, and geometric increase in the availability of the commodities for which academics yearn, attention, applause, fame, and ultimately, adulation of a kind usually reserved for the icons of popular culture." Fish was Exhibit A among professors taking advantage of such trends, and his trailblazing as a lit-crit celebrity inspired the dapper, globe-trotting lit-theory operator Morris Zapp, a character in David Lodge's academic satire Small World. But the world Fish was describing, where no one could live-tweet the lectures, let alone post the talks for worldwide distribution, now seems sepia-toned. "If David Lodge's Morris Zapp were alive and kicking today," observes John Holbo, an associate professor of philosophy at the National University of Singapore, and blogger at Crooked Timber and the Valve, "he'd be giving a TED talk, not an MLA talk. Which is to say: He wouldn't be doing Theory. He probably wouldn't be in an English department."
Q72. The phrase "sepia-toned" implies:
In a famous essay, "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," first published in the early 90s, the literary scholar Stanley Fish wrote that "the flourishing of the lecture circuit has brought with it new sources of extra income ... [and] an ever-growing list of stages on which to showcase one's talents, and geometric increase in the availability of the commodities for which academics yearn, attention, applause, fame, and ultimately, adulation of a kind usually reserved for the icons of popular culture." Fish was Exhibit A among professors taking advantage of such trends, and his trailblazing as a lit-crit celebrity inspired the dapper, globe-trotting lit-theory operator Morris Zapp, a character in David Lodge's academic satire Small World. But the world Fish was describing, where no one could live-tweet the lectures, let alone post the talks for worldwide distribution, now seems sepia-toned. "If David Lodge's Morris Zapp were alive and kicking today," observes John Holbo, an associate professor of philosophy at the National University of Singapore, and blogger at Crooked Timber and the Valve, "he'd be giving a TED talk, not an MLA talk. Which is to say: He wouldn't be doing Theory. He probably wouldn't be in an English department."
Q72. The phrase "sepia-toned" implies:
Show Hint
Think about what an old sepia photograph represents about time.
Updated On: Jul 16, 2026
- The end of an era
- The way things were
- The brown pigment
- The time bound nature of things
Show Solution
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The Correct Option is A
Solution and Explanation
This question asks you to work out the meaning of "sepia-toned" from its context rather than from a dictionary, since the word is being used figuratively here.
- A. The end of an era: sepia is the brownish tint you see in old photographs, so calling something sepia-toned is a common figurative way of saying it belongs to a bygone time, a period that has closed. The sentence says the world Fish described, where lectures could not be live-tweeted or shared worldwide, now seems sepia-toned, which is the author's way of marking that older world as over, replaced by today's connected, TED-talk era.
- B. The way things were: this is close, but it only captures the descriptive half of the meaning, that it refers to the past, without the sense that this past is finished and has been superseded. Sepia-toned carries that extra flavour of nostalgia for something that is gone, not just a neutral reference to an earlier time.
- C. The brown pigment: this is the literal, dictionary meaning of sepia as a colour. The question is about what the phrase implies in this passage, not its literal definition, so this option ignores the figurative use entirely.
- D. The time bound nature of things: this is too abstract and general. The sentence is not making a philosophical point about how all things are limited by time, it is specifically contrasting an old, closed-off world with the present one.
Option A fits best because the sentence is explicitly drawing a line between a world that used to exist and the different world of today, and sepia-toned signals that the earlier world has ended.
Let's summarize:
- Figurative phrases in RC passages should be decoded using the sentence around them, not their literal dictionary sense.
- Here sepia-toned marks the closing of an earlier era of academic life, before TED talks and live-tweeting.
The correct answer is option A, the end of an era.
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