Which of the following sentences with respect to the passage is/are correct ? 1. All rich western nations have been seeing an increase in emigration from Africa over the past few decades. 2. Over the past thirty-five odd years, the number of African origin people living outside Africa has gone up by a factor of three. 3. The fierce resistance to labour incursion into the West will temper emigration from Africa in the 21st century. Select the answer using the codes given below :
- (a)1 and 2
- (b)1 and 3
- (c)2 and 3
- (d)2 only
Answer
Why
Correct — D, (d) 2 only.
The Directions that head this set confine the answer to the contents of the passage alone, so each of the three statements has to be matched against a sentence in the passage - not against what is generally true of migration.
Statement 2 is correct. The passage opens with 'At least 20 million ______ live outside the continent, a three-fold increase since 1990'. A three-fold increase is exactly a rise by a factor of three, and 1990 to the present is about thirty-five years, so the statement is a faithful restatement of the passage's own arithmetic and its own baseline year. Note how little it adds: it changes 'three-fold increase' to 'gone up by a factor of three' and 'since 1990' to 'over the past thirty-five odd years', and nothing else.
Statement 1 is not correct. Two things go wrong with it. First, the passage says Europe's share 'has steadily declined since 1990', which is the opposite of a picture in which every rich Western country is taking more; and the countries the passage does name as having 'seen surges in their African-born populations' are America, China, Saudi Arabia and Turkey - a list in which only one is a rich Western nation. Second, the statement is universal: 'All rich western nations'. The passage makes no claim about all of anything; it names four countries and one continent. A universal claim needs universal support in the text, and there is none.
Statement 3 is not correct, and the passage contradicts it in terms. It says: 'Notwithstanding pushback, African ______ is an unstoppable force that will long outlast today's populists and help define the 21st century.' Statement 3 says the resistance will temper - that is, moderate or restrain - the movement. The passage says the movement will outlast the resistance. That leaves statement 2 standing alone, which is option (d).
Why the others are wrong
- (a)1 and 2 — This pairs the one true statement with the universal claim. Statement 1 asserts that all rich Western nations have seen an increase, and the passage supports neither the 'all' nor, for Europe, the 'increase': Europe holds about half of African migrants abroad but 'its share has steadily declined since 1990'. The four countries the passage credits with surges - America, China, Saudi Arabia and Turkey - are precisely a mixed list, chosen to show that the destinations are no longer mainly Western. Reading statement 1 as true means reading that sentence backwards.
- (b)1 and 3 — This option contains neither correct statement, and its second half is the passage's central claim turned upside down. The passage grants the pushback and then dismisses its long-run force - 'an unstoppable force that will long outlast today's populists'. It also drops statement 2, the one restatement in the item that is drawn word for word from the passage's opening sentence. An option that discards the item's only verifiable statement is worth suspecting on sight.
- (c)2 and 3 — This is the tempting one, because it keeps the correct statement 2 and adds a statement that sounds like sober realism. But statement 3 is not a hedge on the passage's argument, it is the reverse of it: the passage concedes the 'fierce backlash against ______ across the West' in one sentence and then says the movement is unstoppable and will outlast the populists in the next. Under the Directions the plausibility of statement 3 in the world outside the passage is not admissible; only the passage counts, and the passage says the opposite.
Concept
A statement-matching comprehension item is not a test of memory or of judgement about the subject. It is a test of whether a candidate can hold a paraphrase against a source sentence and see where the paraphrase has added something the source does not carry.
Three kinds of addition account for most wrong statements in items of this shape, and all three appear here.
The first is the quantifier. 'All rich western nations' converts a passage that names four countries into a claim about every country in a class. Words like all, every, only, always and none are the load-bearing part of a statement; when the passage lists examples, a statement that generalises them into a universal has changed the claim.
The second is the reversal. Statement 3 takes the passage's concession - there is a fierce backlash - and drops the sentence that answers it. A passage that says 'notwithstanding X, Y will happen' is asserting Y and conceding X, and a statement that reports X as decisive has read half the sentence.
The third, in the correct statement, is the faithful restatement: the same number, the same baseline, different words. 'Three-fold increase since 1990' becomes 'gone up by a factor of three' over 'thirty-five odd years'. Recognising that this is a translation and not a new claim is the other half of the same skill.
This is the second of the five items governed by the passage on African migration, and it is the first to use a numbered statement list. The list shape matters: an option here is a set, so a single false statement condemns every option that contains it, and the fastest route through the item is to find the statement you can falsify from the text and strike out two options at once. Falsifying statement 3 against the 'unstoppable force' sentence removes options (b) and (c) in one move, and the item is then between (a) and (d).
The paper prints its option list for this item as 1 and 2 / 1 and 3 / 2 and 3 / 2 only, and the next item on the same page uses the same four labels in a different order. Reading the option letters rather than the option contents is a real hazard on this page.
The habit the item rewards is mechanical and worth building: read each statement, find the sentence in the passage it is drawn from, and ask what has changed in the crossing. Where nothing has changed but the words, the statement is correct. Where a quantifier, a direction or a conclusion has changed, it is not.
Key facts
- The passage's opening sentence supplies statement 2 whole: at least 20 million people living outside the continent, described as 'a three-fold increase since 1990', which is a rise by a factor of three over about thirty-five years.
- On Europe the passage says the opposite of statement 1's premise - Europe accounts for about half of African migrants outside Africa, 'but its share has steadily declined since 1990'.
- The countries the passage credits with surges in their African-born populations are America, China, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, only one of which is a rich Western nation, so no claim about 'all rich western nations' can be built from it.
- The passage's answer to the backlash is explicit: notwithstanding pushback, African movement is 'an unstoppable force that will long outlast today's populists and help define the 21st century' - which is why statement 3 fails.
- The Directions governing this set require the answer to be based on the contents of the passage alone, so a statement that is arguable in the real world is still incorrect here if the passage does not carry it.
Study next
Common traps
- Answering from what is known about migration politics rather than from the passage, when the Directions expressly confine the answer to the passage.
- Accepting statement 1 because Europe does host large numbers of African migrants - the passage says its share has been declining, which is a different measure from the number.
- Reading the backlash sentence and stopping before the sentence that answers it, which makes statement 3 look like the passage's own view.
- Overlooking that a statement can be correct while adding nothing: statement 2 is a translation of the opening sentence, and its very flatness is the sign that it is faithful.
- Matching option letters between this item and the next one on the same page, whose four labels are the same but in a different order.
EPFO's comprehension sets pair one or two items that ask what a phrase means with one or two that ask which statements about the passage are correct. The statement items are where the marks are lost, because the wrong statements are built from the passage's own vocabulary and differ from it only in a quantifier, a direction or a conclusion. Expect at least one statement that generalises a list of examples into a universal, and at least one that reports a concession as though it were the author's conclusion. The instruction to answer on the content of the passage alone is not decoration: it means that a statement which is true of the world but absent from the passage is wrong for this item, and candidates who bring outside knowledge to these sets consistently lose the marks that reading alone would have won.
Related PYQs
EPFO_EOAO_2023_Q16Directions : Read the following passage carefully and answer the five questions that follow by selecting your answers based solely on the content of the passage and opinion of the author only. The world's life-supporting resources are being depleted at a faster rate than ever before! We have to change our practices and those of the world as a whole towards a more sustainable future. To give us an idea about the dimensions of change, the General Assembly of the United Nations has announced its ‘Agenda 2030’. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals describe the framework of our common global efforts. Within each goal, education holds a key position. Of course education and learning do not function in isolation. In a traditional sense they help to understand the world one lives in and prepare all for a job market with both intrinsic and instrumental values. What are the many roles of education in sustainable development ? Its purpose is transformative in nature, in the sense that it should widen one’s worldview, make one question ‘unsustainability’, and help one build competencies to address global challenges and be accommodated into a global system. Beyond this, education for sustainable development means integrating the ‘future’ as a specific dimension of our learning activities and teaching. How to build a sustainable future must play a central role in educational processes. Globalization, which is sometimes merely seen as global capitalism, has an inevitability about it. Whether we like it or not, we live in a highly interconnected and interdependent world. It is now well recognized that 21st century challenges are global in nature and require cooperation beyond national boundaries. In a sustainable development sense we have to see ourselves as ‘citizens’ of the world and respond accordingly to the global challenges in the present century. In fact, global challenges have expanded the very notion of citizenship itself. There is an increasing recognition of the importance of global citizenship. Which one of the following areas holds a common key position in United Nations ‘Agenda 2030’ ?
- (a) Environment
- (b) Gender
- (c) Globalization
- (d) Education
Answer(d) Education
Opens a comprehension set with the same instruction to answer 'based solely on the content of the passage and opinion of the author only', and shows how strictly that instruction is meant.
EPFO_APFC_2023_Q11Directions : Read the following passage carefully and answer the five questions that follow by selecting your answers based solely on the content of the passage and the opinion of the author only. The millet project of the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation had three objectives—to preserve crop diversity in local millet varieties, to increase production and the consumption of millets, and to enhance farm incomes. The Kolli Hills block of Namakkal district, the project area, is a distinct geographic and agroecological region of the Eastern Ghats, populated by income-poor Scheduled Tribe households. There had been a rapid decline in minor millet cultivation, and a shift in land use towards more profitable crops such as cassava (tapioca), pineapple, coffee, and pepper. As the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has pointed out, the area under nutri-cereals has declined steeply in India since the mid-1980s—from 41 million hectares in the 1980s to 24 million hectares in 2017–18. The reasons for a shift in land use include low yields. Further, processing of millets is a time-consuming and laborious task, undertaken by women. Additionally, very little was marketed, and a tiny share of grain was processed into value-added products. The project intervened in three areas. First, yield enhancement was attempted, using a combination of participatory varietal trials for improved seeds, new agronomic practices, and new technology. Community seed banks were designed and constructed to conserve, restore, revive, strengthen and improve local seed systems. Second, customized post-harvest machineries (pulverizers and dehullers) were introduced. The introduction of small-scale localized mechanical milling, operated by self-help groups, was a game-changer. The third major initiative was training. The Kolli Hills Agrobiodiversity Conservers’ Federation (KHABCOFED) was formed to oversee all activities relating to training and value-addition. Ready-to-cook products were branded under the Kolli Hills Natural Foods label and market links established. Net returns from value-added products were five to ten times higher than those from grains. Yields have risen as a result of improved seeds, agronomic practices and intercropping. There have been significant improvements in incomes from millet farming. The shift from hand-pounding to milling has reduced the drudgery for women and encouraged millet consumption. The number of private mills with customized dehullers and pulverizers has risen (and the technology has been marketed to Krishi Vigyan Kendras across Tamil Nadu). What does “agroecological region of the Eastern Ghats” mean in the passage?
- (a) Area marked by excessive agricultural yield
- (b) Area suitable for developing tourism
- (c) Area with pollution-free characteristics
- (d) Area meant for sustainable farming that works in tandem with nature
Answer(d) Area meant for sustainable farming that works in tandem with nature
A passage-based item on a millet project whose options gloss a term used in the passage; the answer is the one the passage supports rather than the one that is generally true.
EPFO_EOAO_2023_Q20‘There is an increasing recognition of the importance of global citizenship’ because :
- (a) People want to travel more and live in different parts of the world
- (b) It will unite people from all over the world to face the challenges of the 21st century
- (c) People believe that there is a future in foreign countries
- (d) People will cooperate with each other to save themselves from natural disasters
Answer(b) It will unite people from all over the world to face the challenges of the 21st century
Asks why the passage says something is increasingly recognised, and is decided by locating the passage's own reason rather than supplying a plausible one.
Practice
- practice — not a real PYQ
A passage states: 'Remittances to the region rose fourfold between 2000 and 2020, though the share arriving from the Gulf slipped over the same period.' Which of the following statements is correct on the content of the passage alone ? 1. Remittances from the Gulf to the region fell between 2000 and 2020. 2. Total remittances to the region in 2020 were four times their level in 2000. 3. The Gulf accounted for a smaller proportion of remittances to the region in 2020 than in 2000.
- (a)1 and 2
- (b)2 and 3
- (c)1 and 3
- (d)2 only
Answer(b) 2 and 3 - the passage gives the fourfold rise (statement 2) and says the Gulf's share slipped (statement 3). Statement 1 converts a falling share into a falling amount, which does not follow: a shrinking slice of a total that has quadrupled can still be much larger than before.
- practice — not a real PYQ
A passage reads: 'Despite the tightening of visa rules across the bloc, student mobility from the region has continued to climb.' Which one of the following statements is supported by the passage ?
- (a)Visa rules across the bloc have been tightened and student mobility has still risen
- (b)The tightening of visa rules has slowed student mobility from the region
- (c)Every country in the bloc has tightened its visa rules
- (d)Student mobility from the region will fall once the rules are tightened further
Answer(a) Visa rules across the bloc have been tightened and student mobility has still risen - the sentence concedes the tightening and asserts the climb. (b) reverses the concession, (c) turns 'across the bloc' into a claim about every member, and (d) predicts something the sentence does not say.