Read the passage given below and then answer the questions given below the passage. Some words may be highlighted for your attention.
Most societies agree that the drive to protect and nurture one's infant is a basic human trait. Yet infanticide—the killing of an infant at the hands of a parent—has been an accepted practice for disposing of unwanted or deformed children since prehistoric times. Despite human repugnance for the act, most societies, both ancient and contemporary, have practised infanticide. Based on both historical and contemporary data, as many as 10 to 15 percents of all babies were killed by their parents. Some anthropologists have noted that infanticide has been practised by nearly all civilisations. It is quite evident that infanticide must represent a common human trait, perhaps genetically encoded to promote self-survival.
The helpless newborn has not always evoked a protective and loving response, in part because the newborn was not always believed to be human. This belief legitimized an action that under other circumstances would be referred to as murder. For example, the ancient Romans believed that the child was more like a plant than an animal until the seventh day after birth. During the Middle Ages, children born with physical defects or behavioural abnormalities were often viewed as evil or the product of supernatural forces. Changelings were infants believed to be exchanged in the still of the night by devils or goblins who removed the real child and left the changeling in its place. To view the child as potentially evil, dangerous, or worthless: it rationalizes the desire to eliminate the burden or threat without guilt or remorse. Even when population growth was not a factor, poverty was the most common reason why parents killed their offspring. In ancient Greece and Rome, parents who could not afford to raise their children disposed of them, particularly during times of war, famine, and drought. At times children were killed and even consumed by the starving parents. Eskimo children were eaten by the parents and older siblings during times of famine. Cannibalism was common during times of drought among the Australian aboriginals, people normally fond of their children. During extreme droughts, every second child was killed and fed to a preceding child to ensure its survival.
One of the most common factors leading to infanticide is population control. Poverty, famine, and population control are inter-related factors. Where safe and effective birth control was unavailable, infanticide was used to selectively limit the growth of a community. Infanticide allowed for selection of the fittest or most desirable offspring, with sick, deformed, female, or multiple births targeted for disposal. Female infanticide is a problem rooted in a culture of sexism throughout antiquity. In many cultures, girls have little value. Even when female children were not killed at birth, their needs were neglected, particularly if limited resources were needed to ensure the survival of male offspring. In tribal societies, male babies were preferred because males grew up to be hunters and warriors. Young females were seen as a threat because they might attract males from neighbouring tribes.
As in China, the birth of a daughter is seen as a liability. Only sons are allowed to perform the funeral rites at the pyre of their father. The murder of female newborns is so common that it has a special name, kuzhippa, or "baby intended for the burial pit". In India, the practice of female infanticide is even more pervasive. Selective abortion is also a common practice. In 1998 it was reported that in one Bombay clinic, of 8,000 abortions, 7,999 were performed on female fetuses. In 1991, it was estimated that nearly 30 million females were missing in India.
Read the given passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.
There are friends that you have polite chats with, and there are your best friends. They're the people who root for you, no matter what. You tell them your deepest, darkest secrets, and instead of heading for the door, they stick around and your bond with them grows stronger.
A friend recently sent me news about some phenomenal successes he is enjoying in a new business venture. I responded enthusiastically about his amazing gifts. He e-mailed back: "You, my friend, are too much! But I must say, I love having my own cheering section!" I responded, without even thinking, "What are friends for?"
Precisely! Friendship is about being what a hero of mine described as "balcony people" instead of "basement people." Basement people are those who live in our minds, telling us we will never amount to anything, that we are doomed to fail and that we are royal screw-ups. Balcony people are those who are consistently cheering us on. "Go for it," they say to our attempts to find our voice, to live in ever-widening circles, to dare, to create, to break through our lives' sound barriers. While not all of us are made to be married or to live in an intentional formal community, be it a kibbutz, ashram, monastery, convent or commune, all of us are created to live in some form of friendship. Friendships are what help us be human.
My best friends and I get together regularly to share the deepest part of life, the part that is about being as opposed to doing. Sure, we speak about what we do in our jobs, our other relationships, our spiritual, athletic, medical, familial doings. But the experiential, life-giving juice that feeds our soul and binds us together over the years and takes us to ever deeper dimensions is the conversation we have at the being level. That's the place where your soul stands naked before someone else and receives unconditional acceptance in return.
From time to time, we speak about what an exasperation-free oasis our friendship is. Both of us have had some important relationships that soured because someone got exasperated with us. Not that we didn't deserve it. But there is something about my best friends, who just don't get exasperated with me, no matter how much I deserve it. As a result, I am not guarded with them, and when we fall back into old patterns of thinking, "If I tell him this, the friendship is over," that's where we have over the years taken the risk to tell it all. That's where the friendship is made even stronger.
Read the given passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.
There are friends that you have polite chats with, and there are your best friends. They're the people who root for you, no matter what. You tell them your deepest, darkest secrets, and instead of heading for the door, they stick around and your bond with them grows stronger.
A friend recently sent me news about some phenomenal successes he is enjoying in a new business venture. I responded enthusiastically about his amazing gifts. He e-mailed back: "You, my friend, are too much! But I must say, I love having my own cheering section!" I responded, without even thinking, "What are friends for?"
Precisely! Friendship is about being what a hero of mine described as "balcony people" instead of "basement people." Basement people are those who live in our minds, telling us we will never amount to anything, that we are doomed to fail and that we are royal screw-ups. Balcony people are those who are consistently cheering us on. "Go for it," they say to our attempts to find our voice, to live in ever-widening circles, to dare, to create, to break through our lives' sound barriers. While not all of us are made to be married or to live in an intentional formal community, be it a kibbutz, ashram, monastery, convent or commune, all of us are created to live in some form of friendship. Friendships are what help us be human.
My best friends and I get together regularly to share the deepest part of life, the part that is about being as opposed to doing. Sure, we speak about what we do in our jobs, our other relationships, our spiritual, athletic, medical, familial doings. But the experiential, life-giving juice that feeds our soul and binds us together over the years and takes us to ever deeper dimensions is the conversation we have at the being level. That's the place where your soul stands naked before someone else and receives unconditional acceptance in return.
From time to time, we speak about what an exasperation-free oasis our friendship is. Both of us have had some important relationships that soured because someone got exasperated with us. Not that we didn't deserve it. But there is something about my best friends, who just don't get exasperated with me, no matter how much I deserve it. As a result, I am not guarded with them, and when we fall back into old patterns of thinking, "If I tell him this, the friendship is over," that's where we have over the years taken the risk to tell it all. That's where the friendship is made even stronger.
Read the passage given below and then answer the questions given below the passage. Some words may be highlighted for your attention. Pay careful attention.
Like many rich-country governments, Britain’s prides itself on pursuing policies that promote sexual equality. However, it fails to live up to its word, argues the Women’s Budget Group, a feminist think-tank that has been scrutinizing Britain’s economic policy since 1989. A report in 2016 from the House of Commons Library, an impartial research service, suggests that in 2010-15 women bore the cost of 85% of savings to the Treasury worth £23bn ($29bn) from austerity measures, specifically cuts in welfare benefits and indirect taxes. Because women earn less, rely more on benefits, and are much more likely than men to be single parents, the cuts affected them disproportionately.
The government does not set out to discriminate, says Diane Elson, the budget group’s former chair. Rather, it overlooks its own bias because it does not take the trouble to assess how policies affect women. Government budgets are supposed to be “gender-neutral”; in fact, they are gender-ignorant. Ms Elson is one of the originators of a technique called “gender budgeting”—in which governments analyse fiscal policy in terms of its differing effects on men and women. Gender budgeting identifies policies that are unequal as well as opportunities to spend money on helping women and which have a high return. Britain has declined to adopt the technique, but countries from Sweden to South Korea have taken it up.
Ms Elson and her colleagues argue that, once you break down public spending, the opportunities stand out. For instance, if the British government diverted investment worth 2% of GDP from construction to the care sector, it could create 1.5 million jobs instead of 750,000. Many governments treat spending on physical infrastructure as an investment, but spending on social infrastructures, such as child care, as a cost. Yet such spending also increases productivity and growth—partly by increasing the number of women in the workforce. In poorer countries, the bias can be more explicit. When Uganda first looked at its budget through a gender lens, it discovered that little of the spending on agriculture was going to support women farmers, though they did most of the work.
What may sound simply like feminism infiltrating fiscal policy is thus also about efficiency. Gender budgeting is good budgeting, argues Janet Stotsky, who led an IMF survey of such efforts around the world. You don’t have to be a feminist to accept that investing in girls’ education or in women’s labour-force participation will generate a high return on investment.
Such a utilitarian approach appeals to finance ministries in a way that pious talk of “women’s empowerment” may not. Ministries can fail to grasp how their budgets affect women and girls. In developing countries, for instance, investment in clean water and electricity eases housework, freeing time for mothers to earn money and for girls to go to school. Cutting funding may save money in the short term, but when women spend their days fetching water, growth suffers.
There are plenty of examples of the idea in action. In Rwanda spending aimed at keeping girls in school—such as providing basic sanitation—has led to higher enrollment. In India, the use of gender budgeting in a state is a better indicator of girls’ school attendance than higher incomes. In South Korea, a lack of childcare has forced women to choose between work and family. Both female labour- force participation and fertility rates are low—a poor formula for growth in an ageing country. Gender budgeting helped the government design programmes to reduce the burden of care on women. Around the world, safer transport systems can ease the vast, often unseen, burden of violence against women and girls—in medical costs, and lost productivity and labour, as they are prevented from working or learning.
Not everything has gone well for gender budgeting, however. Some initiatives have proved half-hearted, short-lived or prey to party politics. Egypt introduced the concept in 2009, encouraged by international donors; when the donors left, it petered out. Australia was the first country to have gender budgeting. But today’s conservative government saw it as left-leaning and anti-austerity and dropped it in 2014, the year after it took office.
Other countries have issued sexual- equality statements and begun tracking data, but have not changed budget allocations. Much of their reluctance can be put down to bureaucratic inertia—and the sheer difficulty of the process of tracking who gets what. Fiscal policy is based on the market economy, which generates cash, and ignores women’s unpaid labour, and the extent to which it limits their work in the market economy. Rather than rethink the system, governments rely on equal-opportunity laws to cut inequality—though the evidence is that they do not.
Professing loyalty to an idea is easier than acting on its implications and breaking the back of the beast would be difficult. “Everyone is keen to take on gender equality if it only means marginal changes,” says Ms Elson. “Root-and-branch changes to thinking about how the fiscal system supports gender equality are much more difficult.”
Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it.
As a major producer of plastic waste that ends up in the oceans, India is arguably the best place to host World Environment Day. Union Environment Minister Harsh Vardhan has said the government means business, and the UN theme, “Beat Plastic Pollution”, will not remain an empty slogan. His claim would have inspired greater confidence had India taken its own rules on waste management seriously. Both the Solid Waste Management Rules and the Plastic Waste Management Rules of 2016 of 2016, which built on previous regulations, mostly remain on paper. State governments have simply not given them the necessary momentum, and the producers of plastic articles that are invariably used just for a few minutes have shown little concern about their negative environmental impact. The Centre’s somewhat liberal estimate shows over 60% of about 25,000 tonnes of plastic waste generated daily is collected. That essentially means a staggering 10,000 tonnes of trash is being released into the environment, a lot of it going into the sea. Also, not every piece of plastic collected by the system is scientifically processed. It is no surprise, therefore, that the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna river system is on the UN map of 10 rivers worldwide that collectively carry the bulk of the plastic waste into the oceans. The effects are evident: they threaten marine life and the well-being of people, as microplastics are now found even in drinking water. In their response to the crisis, communities and environmentally minded individuals are ahead of governments and municipal authorities. They segregate waste, compost at home, conduct ''plastic free'' social events and help recover materials that would otherwise just be dumped in the suburbs and wetlands. But, valuable as they are, voluntary efforts cannot achieve what systemic reform can. It is the Centre’s responsibility to ensure that the Environment (Protection) Act, the overarching law that enables anti-pollution rules to be issued, is implemented in letter and spirit. Ideally, regulation should help stop the manufacture of single-use plastic articles such as carry bags and cutlery, and encourage the use of biodegradable materials. There is a challenge here, though. The provisions of the Plastic Waste Management Rules require manufacturers of compostable bags to get a certificate from the Central Pollution Control Board, but this has not stopped counterfeit products from entering the market. Local bodies mandated under rules to ensure segregation, collection and transfer of waste to registered recyclers have spectacularly failed to fulfil their responsibilities. The State Level Monitoring Committees provided for under the rules have not been made accountable. The waste management framework is dysfunctional, and Mr. Vardhan’s assertions on beating plastic pollution alone will not inspire confidence. India and the world face a plastics crisis. Solving it will take more than slogans.