General Studies, Essay and Comprehension
Write essays on any four of the following in about 300 words each: 20×4=80
- (a)Digital economy : Opportunities and challenges
- (b)Global peace and national defence budget
- (c)Tribal resistance to colonial rule
- (d)Importance of tropical rain forest
- (e)English in India : Deviance or variance
- (f)Tribal cultures in the age of globalization
Model answer outline
Pick the four topics you know best. Use a short opening, three or four body points and a close.
(a) Digital economy : Opportunities and challenges
- Meaning: trade, payment and services that run on digital networks. UPI, e-commerce and online learning are examples.
- Opportunities: wider access to finance, new jobs, cheaper services and better delivery of welfare through Direct Benefit Transfer.
- India: UPI is among the world’s largest real-time payment systems. The Digital India programme began in 2015.
- Challenges: the digital divide, cyber fraud, data privacy, and job loss through automation.
- Way forward: cheap broadband, digital literacy, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and strong cyber security.
(b) Global peace and national defence budget
- Link: countries spend on arms to feel safe. That spending can raise fear in neighbours and start an arms race.
- Facts: SIPRI reported world military spending of about $2.4 trillion in 2023, a record.
- Trade-off: money for arms is money not spent on health, schools or climate action.
- Counter-view: weak defence can invite attack. India shares tense borders, so it cannot lower its guard.
- Way forward: arms-control treaties, confidence-building steps, self-reliance in defence and talks.
(c) Tribal resistance to colonial rule
- Causes: loss of forest and land, new revenue and forest laws, moneylenders and outside landlords.
- Revolts: the Santhal Hool (1855), the Munda Ulgulan led by Birsa Munda (1899-1900), the Bhil and Kol uprisings, and the Khond revolts.
- Nature: many revolts had a religious or messianic strand. Most were crushed by superior arms.
- Results: laws like the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act, 1908 gave some protection to tribal land.
- Legacy: they showed early resistance to colonial rule and shaped later tribal rights in the Constitution.
(d) Importance of tropical rain forest
- What: forests near the equator with heavy rain all year. Examples are the Amazon, the Congo basin and the forests of South-East Asia.
- Value: they hold a large share of the world’s species, store carbon, and make rain.
- People: many forest communities depend on them. They give timber, medicine and food.
- Threats: logging, cattle ranching, palm oil and mining cut them down every year.
- Way forward: protect forest land, support local communities and promote sustainable use.
(e) English in India : Deviance or variance
- Idea: is Indian English a wrong version of British English, or a valid variety in its own right?
- Variance view: every world English has local words and forms. Indian English has its own words like ‘prepone’ and ‘crore’. Writers like R. K. Narayan and Salman Rushdie use it with ease.
- Deviance view: some say it breaks standard rules, which hurts clarity in global use.
- Balance: clarity and mutual understanding matter most. A variety that works for millions has its own standard.
- Close: Indian English is best seen as a rich variety with a shared core.
(f) Tribal cultures in the age of globalization
- Culture: tribal groups have their own language, art, festivals and ways of managing forests.
- Pressures: mining and dams displace people, markets change livelihoods, and young people leave for towns.
- Gains: better schools, new markets for craft, and a wider voice through media.
- Safeguards: the Fifth and Sixth Schedules, PESA (1996) and the Forest Rights Act, 2006.
- Way forward: consent of the gram sabha for projects, support for local languages and fair prices for tribal produce.
Write arguments for and against each of the following statements: 20×2=40
- (a)Classical literature should be a component of the curriculum
- (b)Housework is unpaid labour
Model answer outline
(a) Classical literature should be a component of the curriculum
- For: it builds language, taste and a sense of heritage. Works like Kalidasa’s Shakuntala or Homer’s epics carry lasting ideas.
- For: it trains close reading and ethical thinking.
- Against: the language is hard and the content may seem far from today’s life.
- Against: crowded syllabi leave little room, and job skills may be pushed aside.
- Conclude: include selected classics, with good translations, beside modern texts.
(b) Housework is unpaid labour
- For: cooking, cleaning and care take hours but earn no wage. Time-use surveys show women do most of it.
- For: this work keeps the paid economy running, yet GDP does not count it.
- Against: many see it as love and duty within a family, not a job to be priced.
- Against: paying for it is hard to put in practice and could fix gender roles.
- Conclude: it is real work. Fair sharing at home and credit in policy matter more than a wage.
Write reports on the following in about 200 words each. Do not mention any name or address in the reports. Use XYZ/ABC, if needed. 10×2=20
- (a)Voter turnout in an election
- (b)Rehabilitation of war victims
Model answer outline
(a) Voter turnout in an election
- Format: heading, date, introduction, findings, suggestions, signature line with XYZ.
- Findings: give the turnout figure for the area, compare it with the last election, and note which groups voted least.
- Causes of low turnout: migration, bad weather, voter apathy and name errors in the rolls.
- Tools: the Election Commission’s SVEEP awareness drive, NOTA (since 2013) and postal ballots.
- Suggestions: clean rolls, more booths, awareness drives and facilities for the elderly and disabled.
(b) Rehabilitation of war victims
- Format: same as above, with ABC as the agency name.
- Needs: shelter, food, medical care, counselling for trauma, schooling for children and jobs.
- Law: the Geneva Conventions (1949) protect civilians and the wounded.
- Challenges: landmines, lost papers, funds and the safety of aid workers.
- Suggestions: skills training, mental-health care, safe return and rebuilding homes with local help.
Attempt a précis of the given passage in one-third of its length. Write, as far as possible, in your own words. The précis should be attempted only on the précis sheets. 15
Immigrants are people who arrive under an immigration policy which gives them the right to become citizens after a relatively short period of time-say, three to five years—subject only to minimal conditions (e.g., learning the official language, and knowing something about the country's history and political institutions). This has been the traditional policy governing immigration in the three major 'countries of immigration'-namely, United States, Canada and Australia.
Historically, immigrant groups have responded very differently to majority nation-building from national minorities. Unlike national minorities, the option of engaging in competing nation-building has been neither desirable nor feasible for immigrant groups in Western democracies. They are typically too small and territorially dispersed to hope to recreate their original societal culture from scratch in a new country. Instead, they have traditionally accepted the expectation that they will integrate into the larger societal culture. Indeed, few immigrant groups have objected to the requirement that they must learn an official language as a condition of citizenship, or that their children must learn the official language in school. They have accepted the assumption that their life-chances, and even more the life-chances of their children, will be bound up with participation in mainstream institutions operating in the majority language.
Western democracies now have over 200 years of experience concerning how such groups integrate, and there is little evidence that legal immigrants with the right to become citizens pose any sort of threat to the unity or stability of a liberal democracy. There are few (if any) examples of immigrant groups mobilizing behind secessionist movements, or nationalist political parties, or supporting revolutionary movements to overthrow elected governments. Instead, they integrate into the existing political system, just as they integrate economically and socially.
So immigrants have not resisted majority nation-building campaigns to integrate them into the mainstream society. However, what immigrants have tried to do is to renegotiate the terms of integration. Indeed, many recent debates over 'multiculturalism' in immigrant countries are precisely debates over renegotiating the terms of integration. Immigrants are demanding a more tolerant or 'multicultural' approach to integration that would allow and support immigrants to maintain various aspects of their ethnic heritage even as they integrate into common institutions operating in the majority language. Immigrants insist that they should be free to maintain some of their old customs regarding food, dress, recreation, religion, and to associate with each other to maintain these practices. This should not be seen as unpatriotic or 'un-American'. Moreover, the institutions of the larger society should be adapted to provide greater recognition and accommodation of these ethnic identities-e.g., schools and other public institutions should accommodate their religious holidays, dress, dietary restrictions, and so on.
Model answer outline
Target: about 150 words. A sample précis:
Immigrants are people who may become citizens within a few years, if they meet small conditions such as learning the official language. In the United States, Canada and Australia this has been the rule. Unlike national minorities, immigrants are too few and scattered to build a rival nation, so they accept integration. They agree to learn the official language and join mainstream institutions. Over two hundred years show no sign that they threaten the unity of a liberal democracy. They do not back secession or revolution. What immigrants do ask for is a new deal on how they integrate. Under multiculturalism they want freedom to keep customs of food, dress, religion and recreation. They also want public institutions, such as schools, to make room for their festivals, dress and diets. Such demands are not unpatriotic.
Tips: keep the order of ideas, drop examples, add a title.
Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow: 4×5=20
The diverse conceptual elements of religion, capital, nature, metaphysics, rationality, science, were tied together in a highly deliberate integration, that is to say in deliberately accruing worldly alliances. Newton's and Boyle's metaphysical view of the new science won out over the freethinkers' and became official only because it was sold to the Anglican establishment and, in an alliance with that establishment, to the powerful mercantile and incipient industrial interests of the period in thoroughly predatory terms. Terms which stressed that how we conceive nature may now be transformed into something, into the kind of thing, that is indefinitely available for our economic gain by processes of extraction, processes such as mining, deforestation, plantation agriculture intended essentially as what we today would call 'agribusiness'. None of these processes could have taken on the unthinking and yet systematic prevalence that they first began to get in this period unless one had ruthlessly revised existing ideas of a world animated by a divine presence. From an anima mundi, one could not simply proceed to take at whim and will. Not that one could not or did not, till then, take at all. But in the past in a wide range of social worlds, such taking as one did had to be accompanied by ritual offerings of reciprocation which were intended to show respect towards as well as to restore the balance in nature, offerings made both before and after cycles of planting, and even hunting. The point is that, in general, the revision of such an age-old conception of nature was achieved in tandem with a range of seemingly miscellaneous elements that were brought together in terms that stressed a future of endlessly profitable consequences that would accrue if one embraced this particular metaphysics of the new science and build, in the name of a notion of rationality around it, the institutions of an increasingly centralized political oligarchy (an incipient state) and an established religious orthodoxy of Anglicanism that had penetrated the universities as well, to promote these very specific interests. These were the very terms that the freethinkers found alarming for politics and culture, alarming for the local and egalitarian ways of life, which some decades earlier the radical elements in the English Revolution such as the Levellers, Diggers, Quakers, Ranters, and other groups had articulated and fought for.
Gandhi, much later, spoke in political terms that were poignantly reminiscent of these radical sectaries and, in Hind Swaraj and other writings, he wrote about science and its relations to these political terms in ways that echoed the alarm of the somewhat later scientific dissenters.
- (a)How did the metaphysical view of the new science become official?
- (b)What was nature reconceived as?
- (c)How was the balance in nature restored in the past?
- (d)What were the kinds of institutions that helped the reconceptualization of nature?
- (e)Why did the freethinkers find the transformation of nature alarming?
Model answer outline
- (a) Newton’s and Boyle’s view won out only because it was sold to the Anglican establishment. Through that alliance it also reached the mercantile and early industrial interests.
- (b) Nature was reconceived as something indefinitely available for economic gain, through mining, deforestation and plantation agriculture.
- (c) In many past societies, people made ritual offerings of reciprocation. These showed respect and restored the balance. They were made before and after planting and even hunting.
- (d) A centralized political oligarchy, an early form of the state, and the established Anglican orthodoxy. The Church’s hold had reached the universities too.
- (e) The terms threatened politics and culture. They were alarming for local, egalitarian ways of life that groups like the Levellers and Diggers had fought for in the English Revolution.
6.(a) Rewrite the sentences as directed: 1×10=10
- (i)Let the door be shut. (Change the voice)
- (ii)He told me that he had not gone there. (Change into direct speech)
- (iii)He had not read the book, he had not seen it either. (Rewrite using 'neither', 'nor')
- (iv)He ___ (do) it for the last two days. (Use the correct form of the verb)
- (v)His brother is more intelligent. (Change into the negative without changing the meaning)
- (vi)He is sitting ___ the shade of a tree. (Insert the correct preposition)
- (vii)He is very strong. He can defeat his enemies. (Combine the two sentences using 'enough')
- (viii)The cat jumped ___ the fence. (Fill in the blank using the correct preposition)
- (ix)He gave a modest answer to the question. (Rewrite the sentence changing the adjective into an adverb)
- (x)It is difficult to get used to (eat) with chopsticks. (Use the correct form of the verb in the brackets)
6.(b) Write one sentence each using the following phrases to bring out their meaning clearly. Do not change the form of the given phrases: 2×5=10
- (i)Bring out
- (ii)Give way
- (iii)Look into
- (iv)Get along
- (v)Bring about
6.(c) Correct the following sentences without making any unnecessary changes: 1×5=5
- (i)He walked one and a half hours.
- (ii)He is always ready to pick up quarrels.
- (iii)I have ordered for dinners.
- (iv)Let us discuss about the problems.
- (v)One cannot be too careful about what he says.
Model answer outline
6.(a)
- (i) Shut the door. (or: Please shut the door.) (ii) He said to me, “I have not gone there.”
- (iii) He had neither read the book nor seen it. (iv) He has been doing it for the last two days.
- (v) His brother is not less intelligent. (vi) in.
- (vii) He is strong enough to defeat his enemies. (viii) over.
- (ix) He answered the question modestly. (x) eating.
6.(b) Sample sentences
- Bring out: The press brought out a special issue.
- Give way: The old bridge gave way under the load.
- Look into: The police will look into the matter.
- Get along: The two brothers get along well.
- Bring about: Good schools bring about real change.
6.(c) Corrected
- (i) He walked for one and a half hours.
- (ii) He is always ready to pick quarrels. (or: picking quarrels)
- (iii) I have ordered dinner.
- (iv) Let us discuss the problems.
- (v) One cannot be too careful about what one says.
English-language questions transcribed from the official C.A.P.F. (ACs) Examination-2024 question paper on upsc.gov.in (General Studies, Essay and Comprehension). Hindi text omitted. Answers are outlines written by MCQquestion.com, not an official key.
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