राज्यसेवा पूर्व परीक्षा २०१७ - Paper 2

Read the following passage and answer the questions from 1 to 5:
Immanuel Kant wrote a treatise called "What is Enlightenment ?” in 1784. He explained that 'Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in the lack of reason but in the lack of courage to use it without direction from another. Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a portion of mankind remains under lifelong tutelage, and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so easy not to be of age. That the step to competence is held to be very dangerous by the far greater portion of mankind is seen to by those guardians who have so kindly assumed superintendence over them. After the guardians have transformed their domestic cattle into dumb followers, and have made sure that these placid creatures will not dare take a single step without the harness of the cart to which they are tethered, the guardians then show them the danger which threatens if they try to go alone. Actually, however, this danger is not so great, for by falling a few times they would finally learn to walk alone. But an example of this failure makes them timid and ordinarily frightens them away from all further trials. "Have courage to use your own reason!" - that is the motto of enlightenment.'
Enlightenment thought culminated historically in the political upheaval of the French Revolution. The traditional hierarchical political and social order – the French monarchy, the privileges of the French nobility, the political power and authority of the Catholic Church — were violently destroyed and replaced by a political and social order informed by the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality for all, founded, upon principles of human reason. It gave rise to a basic model of government founded upon the consent of the governed. This also taught the society to expect that certain basic individual human rights and religious diversity need to be respected and realized by any legitimate political system.
 

Read the following passage and answer the questions from 6 to 10:
Let us further consider the formation of concepts. Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases – which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept 'leaf is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the 'leaf : the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, coloured, curled, and painted - but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model. We call a person 'honest, and then we ask why has he behaved so honestly today ? Our usual answer is, 'on account of his honesty'. Honesty ! This in turn means that the leaf is the cause of the leaves. We know nothing whatsoever about an essential quality called honesty'; but we do know of countless individualized and consequently unequal actions which we equate by omitting the aspects in which they are unequal and which we now designate as 'honest actions. Finally, we formulate from them a qualitas occulta which has the name 'honesty. We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us. For even our contrast between individual and species is something anthropomorphic and does not originate in the essence of things, although we should not presume to claim that this contrast does not correspond to the essence of things : that would, of course, be a dogmatic assertion and, as such, would be just as indemonstrable as its opposite

Read the following passage and answer the questions from 11 to 15 :
Bottled Water and Its Environmental Cost
The next time you buy a bottle of drinking water, you need to pause and think. You may not bat an eyelid shelling out 15 for a litre of bottled water but what you don't realise is that you are actually paying over 4,200 times of what you normally pay for a litre of tap water.
the economics of drinking water has always baffled me. What is perplexing is that the average urban middle class squirms and protests if the Delhi Jal Board, for instance, tries to 'nominally raise the price of tap water. Paying a little over one paise for three litres of tap water (DJB prices tap water at * 3-50 per 1000 litres) they feel they are already being made to pay through the nose,
Price being of little constraint for the consumers, the global bottled water industry is galloping. In 2004, the world consumed 154 billion litres, of which India's share was 5:1 billion litres. Expected to grow at 40 percent annually, the १ 1,800-crore bottle water industry is experiencing unprecedented boom with over 1200 water factories doing business throughout the country.
If you think bottled water assures you of purity and safety, it is time you think again. Even in the U.S., despite strict quality norms formulated by the Food and Drug Administration, it is safely assumed that nearly 40 percent of the bottled water is repacked pipe water.
Shockingly, what is little known is that more than five litres of water is required to produce every litre of packed water. In other words, 770 billion litres of water were used to produce and pack the 154 billion litres of water that the world consumed in 2004. What a colosbal waste !
Bottled water also has additional, hidden environmental costs. According to the Pacific Institute in California, the entire process of making plastic for the bottles requires huge energy. In America alone, where nearly 26 billion litres of bottled water was consumed in 2004, an equivalent of 20 million barrels of oil was required every year to manufacture and transport the bottles. The accumulation of plastic bottles in the landfills also adds to global warming besides contaminating the groundwater.
But are people beginning to see the damage being done by the bottled water industry ? Yes, a number of restaurants in the U.S. have begun to serve only filtered water to customers instead of bottled water. City authorities are also waking up. Recently, San Francisco Mayor, Gavin Newsom has issued an order to ban city departments, agencies and contractors from using city funds to serve water in plastic bottles and in larger dispensers when tap water is available. His argument is that for the price of one litre of bottled water local residents can purchase 1000 litres of safe drinking water from the tapg.

Read the following passage and answer the questions from 16 to 20 :
Poverty springs from a number of sources, the more important of which are controllable. So does special privilege. I think it is entirely feasible to abolish both poverty and special privilege and there can be no questions but that their abolition is desirable. Both are unnatural, but it is work, not law, to which we must look for results.
By poverty I mean the lack of reasonably sufficient food, housing, and clothing for an individual or a family. There will have to be differences in the grades of sustenance. Men are not equal in mentality or in physique. Any plan which starts with the assumption that men are or ought to be equal is unnatural and therefore unworkable. There can be no feasible or desirable process of leveling down. Such a course only promotes poverty by making it universal instead of exceptional. Forcing the efficient producer to become inefficient does not make the inefficient producer more efficient. Poverty can be done away with only by plenty, and we have now gone far enough along in the science of production to be able to see, as a natural development, the day when production and distribution will be so scientific that all may have according to ability and industry.
The extreme Socialists went wide of the mark in their reasoning that industry would inevitably crush the worker. Modern industry is gradually lifting the worker and the world. We only need to know more about planning and methods. The best results can and will be brought about by individual initiative and ingenuity -- by intelligent individual leadership. The government, because it is essentially negative, cannot give positive aid to any really constructive programme. It can give negative aid – by removing obstructions to progress and by ceasing to be a burden upon the community.
The underlying causes of poverty, as I can see them, are essentially due to the bad adjustment between production and distribution, in both industry and agriculture --- between the source of power and its application.