Write a précis of the following passage and suggest a suitable title. ("Despite complaints from viewers, television commercials are not getting any more realistic…")

The passage

Despite complaints from viewers, television commercials are not getting any more realistic. Their makers continue to present idealized people in unreal situations. The wide gaps between their fanciful depiction and the mundane realities of life in most cases make them appear funny as well as repulsive. A footballer suddenly starts scoring goals after consuming a particular energy-drink. A would-be groom avoids hugging his father-in-law because he recalls not having used a particular shampoo that morning. A busy manager leaves an important meeting to grab a dozen packets of his favourite cookies, and so on. The advertisers also persist in showing a version of male-female relationships that can hardly exist in two households in an entire city. A wife panics simply because a meddlesome neighbor points out that her husband’s shirt is dirty, while another fears for her marriage because her finicky husband doesn’t like her coffee. What do the advertisers know about us, or how we see ourselves, that make them continue to plunge millions of dollars into these kinds of commercials? They probably do not know that these glamorous and noisy clips in no way promote the product for which they are aired. The reported number of viewers may be heartening and tempting for the manufacturers of the products. It might also be the main reason for them to keep on hiring the advertisers for promoting these products. In fact, however, these advertisements are mostly watched either to laugh at, or because the viewers are unable to skip them by changing the channel as soon as they start.

Title

Unreal Commercials, Unmoved Viewers

Précis

Despite viewers' complaints, television commercials remain unrealistic. They show idealized people achieving absurd results through ordinary products and depict husbands and wives in petty domestic dramas that scarcely exist in real homes, which makes them both laughable and repellent. Encouraged by high viewership figures, manufacturers keep paying advertisers millions to produce them. Yet such glossy, noisy commercials do little to sell the products, since audiences watch them only to laugh at them or because they cannot avoid them.

(Word count: 78 words; the passage has 261.)

Why this works

Most of this passage is made of examples: the footballer and the energy drink, the groom and the shampoo, the manager and the cookies, the wife and the dirty shirt. A précis keeps what the examples prove, not the examples themselves, so they are condensed into two general phrases ("absurd results through ordinary products" and "petty domestic dramas"). The rhetorical question ("What do the advertisers know about us…?") becomes a statement, and the ending keeps the writer's real point: the commercials are watched but do not sell.

Other suitable titles: "Laughable Advertising", "Commercials Out of Touch with Reality" or "Watched but Not Believed".

A note on the source

FPSC has not published this Special 2023 paper online. The questions here follow two independent copies (cssprepforum.com and CSPs Academy), which agree except for small wording differences noted below. One copy repeats a few lines of this passage by mistake; the text above follows the cleaner copy.

Common mistakes to avoid

Retelling every example, keeping the rhetorical question, adding views on advertising in Pakistan, and choosing a title such as "The Footballer and the Energy Drink" that names only one example.