List of practice Questions

Comprehension:
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
The history of any major technological or industrial advance is inevitably shadowed by a less predictable history of unintended consequences and secondary effects — what economists sometimes call “externalities.” Sometimes those consequences are innocuous ones, or even beneficial. Gutenberg invents the printing press, and literacy rates rise, which causes a significant part of the reading public to require spectacles for the first time, which creates a surge of investment in lens-making across Europe, which leads to the invention of the telescope and the microscope.
Oftentimes the secondary effects seem to belong to an entirely different sphere of society. When Willis Carrier hit upon the idea of air-conditioning, the technology was primarily intended for industrial use: ensuring cool, dry air for factories that required low-humidity environments. But…it touched off one of the largest migrations in the history of the United States, enabling the rise of metropolitan areas like Phoenix and Las Vegas that barely existed when Carrier first started tinkering with the idea in the early 1900s.
Sometimes the unintended consequence comes about when consumers use an invention in a surprising way. Edison famously thought his phonograph, which he sometimes called “the talking machine,” would primarily be used to take dictation….But then later innovators… discovered a much larger audience willing to pay for musical recordings made on descendants of Edison’s original invention. In other cases, the original innovation comes into the world disguised as a plaything…the way the animatronic dolls of the mid-1700s inspired Jacquard to invent the first “programmable” loom and Charles Babbage to invent the first machine that fit the modern definition of a computer, setting the stage for the revolution in programmable technology that would transform the 21st century in countless ways.
We live under the gathering storm of modern history’s most momentous unintended consequence….carbon-based climate change. Imagine the vast sweep of inventors whose ideas started the Industrial Revolution, all the entrepreneurs and scientists and hobbyists who had a hand in bringing it about. Line up a thousand of them and ask them all what they had been hoping to do with their work. Not one would say that their intent had been to deposit enough carbon in the atmosphere to create a greenhouse effect that trapped heat at the surface of the planet. And yet here we are.
Ethyl (leaded fuel) and Freon belonged to the same general class of secondary effect: innovations whose unintended consequences stem from some kind of waste by-product that they emit. But the potential health threats of Ethyl (unleaded fuel) were visible in the 1920s, unlike, say, the long-term effects of atmospheric carbon build up in the early days of the Industrial Revolution….
Indeed, it is reasonable to see CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) as a forerunner of the kind of threat we will most likely face in the coming decades, as it becomes increasingly possible for individuals or small groups to create new scientific advances — through chemistry or biotechnology or materials science — setting off unintended consequences that reverberate on a global scale.

Comprehension:
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
(. . .) There are three other common drivers for carnivore-human attacks, some of which are more preventable than others. Natural aggression-based conflicts – such as those involving females protecting their young or animals protecting a food source – can often be avoided as long as people stay away from those animals and their food.
Carnivores that recognise humans as a means to get food, are a different story. As they become more reliant on human food they might find at campsites or in rubbish bins, they become less avoidant of humans. Losing that instinctive fear response puts them into more situations where they could get into an altercation with a human, which often results in that bear being put down by humans. “A fed bear is a dead bear,” says Servheen, referring to a common saying among biologists and conservationists.
Predatory or predation-related attacks are quite rare, only accounting for 17% of attacks in North America since 1955. They occur when a carnivore views a human as prey and hunts it like it would any other animal it uses for food. (. . .)
Then there are animal attacks provoked by people taking pictures with them or feeding them in natural settings such as national parks which often end with animals being euthanised out of precaution. “Eventually, that animal becomes habituated to people, and [then] bad things happen to the animal. And the folks who initially wanted to make that connection don’t necessarily realise that,” says Christine Wilkinson, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, California, who’s been studying coyote-human conflicts.
After conducting countless postmortems on all types of carnivore-human attacks spanning 75 years, Penteriani’s team believes 50% could have been avoided if humans reacted differently. A 2017 study co-authored by Penteriani found that engaging in risky behaviour around large carnivores increases the likelihood of an attack.
Two of the most common risky behaviours are parents leaving their children to play outside unattended and walking an unleashed dog, according to the study. Wilkinson says 66% of coyote attacks involve a dog. “[People] end up in a situation where their dog is being chased, or their dog chases a coyote, or maybe they’re walking their dog near a den that’s marked, and the coyote wants to escort them away,” says Wilkinson.
Experts believe climate change also plays a part in the escalation of human-carnivore conflicts, but the correlation still needs to be ironed out. “As finite resources become scarcer, carnivores and people are coming into more frequent contact, which means that more conflict could occur,” says Jen Miller, international programme specialist for the US Fish & Wildlife Service. For example, she says, there was an uptick in lion attacks in western India during a drought when lions and people were relying on the same water sources.
(. . .) The likelihood of human-carnivore conflicts appears to be higher in areas of low-income countries dominated by vast rural landscapes and farmland, according to Penteriani’s research. “There are a lot of working landscapes in the Global South that are really heterogeneous, that are interspersed with carnivore habitats, forests and savannahs, which creates a lot more opportunity for these encounters, just statistically,” says Wilkinson.

The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Fears of artificial intelligence (AI) have haunted humanity since the very beginning of the computer age. Hitherto these fears focused on machines using physical means to kill, enslave or replace people. But over the past couple of years new AI tools have emerged that threaten the survival of human civilisation from an unexpected direction. AI has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language, whether with words, sounds or images. AI has thereby hacked the operating system of our civilisation.
Language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of. Human rights, for example, aren’t inscribed in our DNA. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by telling stories and writing laws. Gods aren’t physical realities. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by inventing myths and writing scriptures….What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures? When people think about Chatgpt and other new AI tools, they are often drawn to examples like school children using AI to write their essays. What will happen to the school system when kids do that? But this kind of question misses the big picture. Forget about school essays. Think of the next American presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of AI tools that can be made to mass-produce political content, fake-news stories and scriptures for new cults…
Through its mastery of language, AI could even form intimate relationships with people, and use the power of intimacy to change our opinions and worldviews. Although there is no indication that AI has any consciousness or feelings of its own, to foster fake intimacy with humans it is enough if the AI can make them feel emotionally attached to it….
What will happen to the course of history when AI takes over culture, and begins producing stories, melodies, laws and religions? Previous tools like the printing press and radio helped spread the cultural ideas of humans, but they never created new cultural ideas of their own. AI is fundamentally different. AI can create completely new ideas, completely new culture…. Of course, the new power of AI could be used for good purposes as well. I won’t dwell on this, because the people who develop AI talk about it enough….
We can still regulate the new AI tools, but we must act quickly. Whereas nukes cannot invent more powerful nukes, AI can make exponentially more powerful AI.… Unregulated AI deployments would create social chaos, which would benefit autocrats and ruin democracies. Democracy is a conversation, and conversations rely on language. When AI hacks language, it could destroy our ability to have meaningful conversations, thereby destroying democracy….And the first regulation I would suggest is to make it mandatory for AI to disclose that it is an AI. If I am having a conversation with someone, and I cannot tell whether it is a human or an AI—that’s the end of democracy. This text has been generated by a human. Or has it?

The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
There is a group in the space community who view the solar system not as an opportunity to expand human potential but as a nature preserve, forever the provenance of an elite group of scientists and their sanitary robotic probes. These planetary protection advocates [call] for avoiding “harmful contamination” of celestial bodies. Under this regime, NASA incurs great expense sterilizing robotic probes in order to prevent the contamination of entirely theoretical biospheres. . . .
Transporting bacteria would matter if Mars were the vital world once imagined by astronomers who mistook optical illusions for canals. Nobody wants to expose Martians to measles, but sadly, robotic exploration reveals a bleak, rusted landscape, lacking oxygen and flooded with radiation ready to sterilize any Earthly microbes. Simple life might exist underground, or down at the bottom of a deep canyon, but it has been very hard to find with robots. . . . The upsides from human exploration and development of Mars clearly outweigh the welfare of purely speculative Martian fungi. . . .
The other likely targets of human exploration, development, and settlement, our moon and the asteroids, exist in a desiccated, radiation-soaked realm of hard vacuum and extreme temperature variations that would kill nearly anything. It’s also important to note that many international competitors will ignore the demands of these protection extremists in any case. For example, China recently sent a terrarium to the moon and germinated a plant seed—with, unsurprisingly, no protest from its own scientific community. In contrast, when it was recently revealed that a researcher had surreptitiously smuggled super-resilient microscopic tardigrades aboard the ill-fated Israeli Beresheet lunar probe, a firestorm was unleashed within the space community. . . .
NASA’s previous human exploration efforts made no serious attempt at sterility, with little notice. As the Mars expert Robert Zubrin noted in the National Review, U.S. lunar landings did not leave the campsites cleaner than they found it. Apollo’s bacteria-infested litter included bags of feces. Forcing NASA’s proposed Mars exploration to do better, scrubbing everything and hauling out all the trash, would destroy NASA’s human exploration budget and encroach on the agency’s other directorates, too. Getting future astronauts off Mars is enough of a challenge, without trying to tote weeks of waste along as well.
A reasonable compromise is to continue on the course laid out by the U.S. government and the National Research Council, which proposed a system of zones on Mars, some for science only, some for habitation, and some for resource exploitation. This approach minimizes contamination, maximizes scientific exploration . . . Mars presents a stark choice of diverging human futures. We can turn inward, pursuing ever more limited futures while we await whichever natural or manmade disaster will eradicate our species and life on Earth. Alternatively, we can choose to propel our biosphere further into the solar system, simultaneously protecting our home planet and providing a backup plan for the only life we know exists in the universe. Are the lives on Earth worth less than some hypothetical microbe lurking under Martian rocks?

The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Moutai has been the global booze sensation of the decade. A bottle of its Flying Fairy which sold in the 1980s for the equivalent of a dollar now retails for $400. Moutai’s listed shares have soared by almost 600% in the past five years, outpacing the likes of Amazon. . . . It does this while disregarding every Western marketing mantra. It is not global, has meagre digital sales and does not appeal to millennials. It scores pitifully on environmental, social and governance measures. In the Boy Scout world of Western business it would leave a bad taste, in more ways than one.
Moutai owes its intoxicating success to three factors—not all of them easy to emulate. First, it profits from Chinese nationalism. Moutai is known as the “national liquor”. It was used to raise spirits and disinfect wounds in Mao’s Long March. It was Premier Zhou Enlai’s favourite tipple, shared with Richard Nixon in 1972. Its centuries-old craftsmanship—it is distilled eight times and stored for years in earthenware jars—is a source of national pride. It also claims to be hangover-proof, which would make it an invention to rival gunpowder....
Second, it chose to serve China’s super-rich rather than its middle class. Markets are littered with the corpses of firms that could not compete in the cut-throat battle for Chinese middle class wallets. And the country’s premium market is massive—at 73m-strong, bigger than the population of France, notes Euan McLeish of Bernstein, an investment firm, and still less crowded with prestige brands than advanced economies. Moutai is to these well-heeled drinkers what vintage champagne is to the rest of the world.....
Third, Moutai looks beyond affluent millennials and digital natives. The elderly and the middle aged, it found, can be just as lucrative. Its biggest market now is (male) drinkers in their mid 30s. Many have no siblings, thanks to four decades of China’s one-child policy—which also means their elderly parents can splash out on weddings and banquets. Moutai is often a guest of honour.
Moutai has succeeded thanks to nationalism, elitism and ageism, in other words—not in spite of this unholy trinity. But it faces risks. The government is its largest shareholder—and a meddlesome one. It appears to want prices to remain stable. Exorbitantly priced booze is at odds with its professed socialist ideals. Yet minority investors—including many foreign funds —lament that Moutai’s wholesale price is a third of what it sells for in shops. Raising it could boost the company’s profits further. Instead, in what some see as a travesty of corporate governance, its majority owner has plans to set up its own sales channel.....
In the long run, its biggest risk may be millennials. As they grow older, health concerns, work life balance and the desire for more wholesome pursuits than binge-drinking may curb the “Ganbei!” toasting culture [heavy drinking] on which so much of the demand for Moutai rests. For the time being, though, the party goes on.

The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Languages become endangered and die out for many reasons. Sadly, the physical annihilation of communities of native speakers of a language is all too often the cause of language extinction. In North America, European colonists brought death and destruction to many Native American communities. This was followed by US federal policies restricting the use of indigenous languages, including the removal of native children from their communities to federal boarding schools where native languages and cultural practices were prohibited. As many as 75 percent of the languages spoken in the territories that became the United States have gone extinct, with slightly better language survival rates in Central and South America . . .
Even without physical annihilation and prohibitions against language use, the language of the "dominant" cultures may drive other languages into extinction; young people see education, jobs, culture and technology associated with the dominant language and focus their attention on that language. The largest language "killers" are English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian, Hindi, and Chinese, all of which have privileged status as dominant languages threatening minority languages. When we lose a language, we lose the worldview, culture and knowledge of the people who spoke it, constituting a loss to all humanity. People around the world live in direct contact with their native environment, their habitat. When the language they speak goes extinct, the rest of humanity loses their knowledge of that environment, their wisdom about the relationship between local plants and illness, their philosophical and religious beliefs as well as their native cultural expression (in music, visual art and poetry) that has enriched both the speakers of that language and others who would have encountered that culture. . . . As educators deeply immersed in the liberal arts, we believe that educating students broadly in all facets of language and culture . . . yields immense rewards. Some individuals educated in the liberal arts tradition will pursue advanced study in linguistics and become actively engaged in language preservation, setting out for the Amazon, for example, with video recording equipment to interview the last surviving elders in a community to record and document a language spoken by no children.
Certainly, though, the vast majority of students will not pursue this kind of activity. For these students, a liberal arts education is absolutely critical from the twin perspectives of language extinction and global citizenship. When students study languages other than their own, they are sensitized to the existence of different cultural perspectives and practices. With such an education, students are more likely to be able to articulate insights into their own cultural biases, be more empathetic to individuals of other cultures, communicate successfully across linguistic and cultural differences, consider and resolve questions in a way that reflects multiple cultural perspectives, and, ultimately extend support to people, programs, practices, and policies that support the preservation of endangered languages.
There is ample evidence that such preservation can work in languages spiraling toward extinction. For example, Navajo, Cree and Inuit communities have established schools in which these languages are the language of instruction and the number of speakers of each has increased.

The table given below shows the amount, in grams, of carbohydrate, protein, fat and all other nutrients, per 100 grams of nutrients in seven foodgrains. The first column shows the foodgrain category and the second column its codename. The table has some missing values.

The following additional facts are known.
1. Both the pseudo-cereals had higher amounts of carbohydrate as well as higher amounts of protein than any millet.
2. Both the cereals had higher amounts of carbohydrate than any pseudo-cereal.
3. All the missing values of carbohydrate amounts (in grams) for all the foodgrains are non zero multiples of 5.
4. All the missing values of protein, fat and other nutrients amounts (in grams) for all the foodgrains are non-zero multiples of 4.
5. P1 contained double the amount of protein that M3 contains.

A 10 kg tomato pulp is concentrated from an initial moisture content of 90% (wet weight basis) to 35% (wet weight basis). The weight of the concentrate in kg is_____(round off to 2 decimal places).

The chart below shows the price data for seven shares – A, B, C, D, E, F, and G as a candlestick plot for a particular day. The vertical axis shows the price of the share in rupees. A share whose closing price (price at the end of the day) is more than its opening price (price at the start of the day) is called a bullish share; otherwise, it is called a bearish share. All bullish and bearish shares are shown in green and red colour respectively.

Two students, Amiya and Ramya are the only candidates in an election for the position of class representative. Students will vote based on the intensity level of Amiya’s and Ramya’s campaigns and the type of campaigns they run. Each campaign is said to have a level of 1 if it is a staid campaign and a level of 2 if it is a vigorous campaign. Campaigns can be of two types, they can either focus on issues, or on attacking the other candidate.
If Amiya and Ramya both run campaigns focusing on issues, then
• The percentage of students voting in the election will be 20 times the sum of the levels of campaigning of the two students. For example, if Amiya and Ramya both run vigorous campaigns, then $20 × (2+2)\%$, that is, $80\%$ of the students will vote in the election.
• Among voting students, the percentage of votes for each candidate will be proportional to the levels of their campaigns. For example, if Amiya runs a staid (i.e., level 1) campaign while Ramya runs a vigorous (i.e., level 2) campaign, then Amiya will receive \(\frac{1}{3}\) of the votes cast, and Ramya will receive the other \(\frac{2}{3}\).
The above-mentioned percentages change as follows if at least one of them runs a campaign attacking their opponent.
• If Amiya runs a campaign attacking Ramya and Ramya runs a campaign focusing on issues, then $10\%$ of the students who would have otherwise voted for Amiya will vote for Ramya, and another $10\%$ who would have otherwise voted for Amiya, will not vote at all.
• If Ramya runs a campaign attacking Amiya and Amiya runs a campaign focusing on issues, then $20\%$ of the students who would have otherwise voted for Ramya will vote for Amiya, and another $5\%$ who would have otherwise voted for Ramya, will not vote at all.
• If both run campaigns attacking each other, then $10\%$ of the students who would have otherwise voted for them had they run campaigns focusing on issues, will not vote at all.

Six web surfers M, N, O, P, X, and Y each had 30 stars which they distributed among four bloggers A, B, C, and D. The number of stars received by A and B from the six web surfers is shown in the figure below

The following additional facts are known regarding the number of stars received by the bloggers from the surfers.
1. The numbers of stars received by the bloggers from the surfers were all multiples of 5 (including 0).
2. The total numbers of stars received by the bloggers were the same.
3. Each blogger received a different number of stars from M.
4. Two surfers gave all their stars to a single blogger.
5. D received more stars than C from Y

The chart below provides complete information about the number of countries visited by Dheeraj, Samantha and Nitesh, in Asia, Europe and the rest of the world (ROW).

The following additional facts are known about the countries visited by them.
1. 32 countries were visited by at least one of them.
2. USA (in ROW) is the only country that was visited by all three of them.
3. China (in Asia) is the only country that was visited by both Dheeraj and Nitesh, but not by Samantha.
4. France (in Europe) is the only country outside Asia, which was visited by both Dheeraj and Samantha, but not by Nitesh.
5. Half of the countries visited by both Samantha and Nitesh are in Europe.

Comprehension:
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question
Landing in Australia, the British colonists weren’t much impressed with the small-bodied, slender-snooted marsupials called bandicoots. “Their muzzle, which is much too long, gives them an air exceedingly stupid,” one naturalist noted in 1805. They nicknamed one type the “zebra rat” because of its black-striped rump.
Silly-looking or not, though, the zebra rat—the smallest bandicoot, more commonly known today as the western barred bandicoot—exhibited a genius for survival in the harsh outback, where its ancestors had persisted for some 26 million years. Its births were triggered by rainfall in the bone-dry desert. It carried its breath-mint-size babies in a backward-facing pouch so mothers could forage for food and dig shallow, camouflaged shelters.
Still, these adaptations did not prepare the western barred bandicoot for the colonial-era transformation of its ecosystem, particularly the onslaught of imported British animals, from cattle and rabbits that damaged delicate desert vegetation to ravenous house cats that soon developed a taste for bandicoots. Several of the dozen-odd bandicoot species went extinct, and by the 1940s the western barred bandicoot, whose original range stretched across much of the continent, persisted only on two predator-free islands in Shark Bay, off Australia’s western coast.
“Our isolated fauna had simply not been exposed to these predators,” says Reece Pedler, an ecologist with the Wild Deserts conservation program.
Now Wild Deserts is using descendants of those few thousand island survivors, called Shark Bay bandicoots, in a new effort to seed a mainland bandicoot revival. They’ve imported 20 bandicoots to a preserve on the edge of the Strzelecki Desert, in the remote interior of New South Wales. This sanctuary is a challenging place, desolate much of the year, with one of the world’s most mercurial rainfall patterns—relentless droughts followed by sudden drenching floods.
The imported bandicoots occupy two fenced “exclosures,” cleared of invasive rabbits (courtesy of Pedler’s sheepdog) and of feral cats (which slunk off once the rabbits disappeared). A third fenced area contains the program’s Wild Training Zone, where two other rare marsupials (bilbies, a larger type of bandicoot, and mulgaras, a somewhat fearsome fuzzball known for sucking the brains out of prey) currently share terrain with controlled numbers of cats, learning to evade them. It’s unclear whether the Shark Bay bandicoots, which are perhaps even more predator-naive than their now-extinct mainland bandicoot kin, will be able to make that kind of breakthrough.
For now, though, a recent surge of rainfall has led to a bandicoot joey boom, raising the Wild Deserts population to about 100, with other sanctuaries adding to that number. There are also signs of rebirth in the landscape itself. With their constant digging, the bandicoots trap moisture and allow for seed germination so the cattle-damaged desert can restore itself.
They have a new nickname—a flattering one, this time. “We call them ecosystem engineers,” Pedler says.

Comprehension: The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question. Oftentimes, when economists cross borders, they are less interested in learning from others than in invading their garden plots. Gary Becker, for instance, pioneered the idea of human capital. To do so, he famously tackled topics like crime and domesticity, applying methods honed in the study of markets to domains of nonmarket life. He projected economics outward into new realms: for example, by revealing the extent to which humans calculate marginal utilities when choosing their spouses or stealing from neighbors. At the same time, he did not let other ways of thinking enter his own economic realm: for example, he did not borrow from anthropology or history or let observations of nonmarket economics inform his homo economicus. Becker was a picture of the imperial economist in the heyday of the discipline’s bravura. Times have changed for the once almighty discipline. Economics has been taken to task, within and beyond its ramparts. Some economists have reached out, imported, borrowed, and collaborated—been less imperial, more open. Consider Thomas Piketty and his outreach to historians. The booming field of behavioral economics—the fusion of economics and social psychology—is another case. Having spawned active subfields, like judgment, decision making and a turn to experimentation, the field aims to go beyond the caricature of Rational Man to explain how humans make decisions…. It is important to underscore how this flips the way we think about economics. For generations, economists have presumed that people have interests—“preferences,” in the neoclassical argot—that get revealed in the course of peoples’ choices. Interests come before actions and determine them. If you are hungry, you buy lunch; if you are cold, you get a sweater. If you only have so much money and can’t afford to deal with both your growling stomach and your shivering, which need you choose to meet using your scarce savings reveals your preference. Psychologists take one look at this simple formulation and shake their heads. Increasingly, even some mainstream economists have to admit that homo economicus doesn’t always behave like the textbook maximizer; irrational behavior can’t simply be waved away as extra economic expressions of passions over interests, and thus the domain of other disciplines…. This is one place where the humanist can help the economist. If narrative economics is going to help us understand how rivals duke it out, who wins and who loses, we are going to need much more than lessons from epidemiological studies of viruses or intracranial stimuli. Above all, we need politics and institutions. Shiller [the Nobel prize winning economist] connects perceptions of narratives to changes in behavior and thence to social outcomes. He completes a circle that was key to behavioral economics and brings in storytelling to make sense of how perceptions get framed. This cycle (perception to behavior to society) was once mediated or dominated by institutions: the political parties, lobby groups, and media organizations that played a vital role in legitimating, representing, and excluding interests. Yet institutions have been stripped from Shiller’s account, to reveal a bare dynamic of emotions and economics, without the intermediating place of politics.

The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
. . . [T]he idea of craftsmanship is not simply nostalgic. . . . Crafts require distinct skills, an all round approach to work that involves the whole product, rather than individual parts, and an attitude that necessitates devotion to the job and a focus on the communal interest. The concept of craft emphasises the human touch and individual judgment.
Essentially, the crafts concept seems to run against the preponderant ethos of management studies which, as the academics note, have long prioritised efficiency and consistency. . . . Craft skills were portrayed as being primitive and traditionalist.
The contrast between artisanship and efficiency first came to the fore in the 19th century when British manufacturers suddenly faced competition from across the Atlantic as firms developed the “American system” using standardised parts. . . . the worldwide success of the Singer sewing machine showed the potential of a mass-produced device. This process created its own reaction, first in the form of the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century, and then again in the “small is beautiful” movement of the 1970s. A third crafts movement is emerging as people become aware of the environmental impact of conventional industry.
There are two potential markets for those who practise crafts. The first stems from the existence of consumers who are willing to pay a premium price for goods that are deemed to be of extra quality. . . . The second market lies in those consumers who wish to use their purchases to support local workers, or to reduce their environmental impact by taking goods to craftspeople to be mended, or recycled.
For workers, the appeal of craftsmanship is that it allows them the autonomy to make creative choices, and thus makes a job far more satisfying. In that sense, it could offer hope for the overall labour market. Let the machines automate dull and repetitive tasks and let workers focus purely on their skills, judgment and imagination. As a current example, the academics cite the “agile” manifesto in the software sector, an industry at the heart of technological change. The pioneers behind the original agile manifesto promised to prioritise “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. By bringing together experts from different teams, agile working is designed to improve creativity.
But the broader question is whether crafts can create a lot more jobs than they do today. Demand for crafted products may rise but will it be easy to retrain workers in sectors that might get automated (such as truck drivers) to take advantage? In a world where products and services often have to pass through regulatory hoops, large companies will usually have the advantage.
History also suggests that the link between crafts and creativity is not automatic. Medieval craft guilds were monopolies which resisted new entrants. They were also highly hierarchical with young men required to spend long periods as apprentices and journeymen before they could set up on their own; by that time the innovative spirit may have been knocked out of them. Craft workers can thrive in the modern era, but only if they don’t get too organised.

The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
In the summer of 2022, subscribers to the US streaming service HBO MAX were alarmed to discover that dozens of the platform’s offerings – from the Covid-themed heist thriller Locked Down to the recent remake of The Witches – had been quietly removed from the service . . . The news seemed like vindication to those who had long warned that streaming was more about controlling access to the cultural commons than expanding it, as did reports (since denied by the show’s creators) that Netflix had begun editing old episodes of Stranger Things to retroactively improve their visual effects.
What’s less clear is whether the commonly prescribed cure for these cultural ills – a return to the material pleasures of physical media – is the right one. While the makers of Blu-ray discs claim they have a shelf life of 100 years, such statistics remain largely theoretical until they come to pass, and are dependent on storage conditions, not to mention the continued availability of playback equipment. The humble DVD has already proved far less resilient, with many early releases already beginning to deteriorate in quality Digital movie purchases provide even less security. Any film “bought” on iTunes could disappear if you move to another territory with a different rights agreement and try to redownload it. It’s a bold new frontier in the commodification of art: the birth of the product recall. After a man took to Twitter to bemoan losing access to Cars 2 after moving from Canada to Australia, Apple clarified that users who downloaded films to their devices would retain permanent access to those downloads, even if they relocated to a hemisphere where the [content was] subject to a different set of rights agreements. Thanks to the company’s ironclad digital rights management technology, however, such files cannot be moved or backed up, locking you into watching with your Apple account.
Anyone who does manage to acquire Digital Rights Management free (DRM-free) copies of their favourite films must nonetheless grapple with ever-changing file format standards, not to mention data decay – the gradual process by which electronic information slowly but surely corrupts. Only the regular migration of files from hard drive to hard drive can delay the inevitable, in a sisyphean battle against the ravages of digital time.
In a sense, none of this is new. Charlie Chaplin burned the negative of his 1926 film A Woman of the Sea as a tax write-off. Many more films have been lost through accident, negligence or plain indifference. During a heatwave in July 1937, a Fox film vault in New Jersey burned down, destroying a majority of the silent films produced by the studio.
Back then, at least, cinema was defined by its ephemerality: the sense that a film was as good as gone once it left your local cinema. Today, with film studios keen to stress the breadth of their back catalogues (or to put in Hollywood terms, the value of their IPs), audiences may start to wonder why those same studios seem happy to set the vault alight themselves if it’ll help next quarter’s numbers.

The game of QUIET is played between two teams. Six teams, numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, play in a QUIET tournament. These teams are divided equally into two groups. In the tournament, each team plays every other team in the same group only once, and each team in the other group exactly twice. The tournament has several rounds, each of which consists of a few games. Every team plays exactly one game in each round.
The following additional facts are known about the schedule of games in the tournament.
1. Each team played against a team from the other group in Round 8.
2. In Round 4 and Round 7, the match-ups, that is the pair of teams playing against each other, were identical. In Round 5 and Round 8, the match ups were identical.
3. Team 4 played Team 6 in both Round 1 and Round 2.
4. Team 1 played Team 5 ONLY once and that was in Round 2.
5. Team 3 played Team 4 in Round 3. Team 1 played Team 6 in Round 6.
6. In Round 8, Team 3 played Team 6, while Team 2 played Team 5.

If each term of a geometric progression \( a_1, a_2, a_3, \dots \) with \( a_1 = \frac{1}{8} \) and \( a_2 \neq a_1 \), is the arithmetic mean of the next two terms and \( S_n = a_1 + a_2 + \dots + a_n \), then \( S_{20} - S_{18} \) is equal to

Consider the 3 × 3 matrix M = \(\begin{bmatrix} 1 & 2 & 3 \\ 3 & 1 & 3 \\ 4 & 3 & 6 \end{bmatrix}.\)
The determinant of (M² + 12M) is ________.

Given below are two statements: one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other is labelled as Reason (R).
Assertion (A): In aqueous solutions \( \text{Cr}^{2+} \) is reducing while \( \text{Mn}^{3+} \) is oxidising in nature.
Reason (R): Extra stability to half-filled electronic configuration is observed than incompletely filled electronic configuration.
In the light of the above statement, choose the most appropriate answer from the options given below:

Given below are two statements:
Statement (I): A \(\pi\) bonding MO has lower electron density above and below the inter-nuclear axis.
Statement (II): The \(\pi^*\) antibonding MO has a node between the nuclei.
In the light of the above statements, choose the most appropriate answer from the options given below:

Given below are two statements :
Statement (I) : Both metal and non-metal exist in p and d-block elements.
Statement (II) : Non-metals have higher ionisation enthalpy and higher electronegativity than the metals.
In the light of the above statements, choose the most appropriate answer from the option given below:

Match List - I with List - II.

Choose the correct answer from the options given below.

The transition metal having highest \(3^\text{rd}\) ionisation enthalpy is:

Among \(\text{CrO}\), \(\text{Cr}_2\text{O}_3\), and \(\text{CrO}_3\), the sum of spin-only magnetic moment values of basic and amphoteric oxides is ______ \( \times 10^{-2} \, \text{BM} \) (nearest integer).
Given: Atomic number of Cr is 24.