EPFO APFC 2023 General Studies · Question 113 of 120

Correct — A, (a) 1 only. Before the geography, read the printing, because this is the most dangerous stem in the whole block. Seventeen stems in this booklet ask a negative question, and on every one of them the word 'not' is set in bold italics, so a candidate quickly learns to treat bold as the signal that the answer is the false statement. This question carries no such signal. Its ask — 'Which of the above statements is/are correct?' — is entirely positive, and the negation is buried inside statement 2, printed in ordinary weight along with the rest of the sentence. A candidate trained by the other seventeen items gets no warning at all here, and the commonest way to lose the mark is to register the two statements as saying much the same thing and never notice that the second one denies what the first asserts about a different aspect. Now the substance. Statement 1 says that population change in an area is an important indicator of economic development of that region, and it is correct. The number of people in a region rises or falls through only three mechanisms — births, deaths and migration — and each of the three responds to economic conditions. Regions with work draw migrants and regions without work lose them, so net migration tracks economic opportunity closely; falling death rates follow improvements in nutrition, sanitation and medical care that economic development pays for; and falling birth rates follow the same development working through education, urbanisation and the changing cost of raising children. This is the standard treatment in school geography, where population change is presented as an indicator of the economic development, the social upliftment and the historical and cultural background of a region. Statement 2 says that population change is not an indicator of social upliftment, and it is incorrect for exactly the reason statement 1 is correct. Population change is among the most-used indicators of social progress there is. A falling infant mortality rate, a rising life expectancy, a falling total fertility rate and a rising age at marriage are all components or immediate consequences of population change, and every one of them is read as evidence of better health care, better education and improved status of women. The demographic transition, in which high birth and death rates give way to low ones, is described by demographers as a social transformation quite as much as an economic one. So statement 1 stands and statement 2 falls, and the code that says so is option (a). Notice, finally, the modest word both statements use: 'indicator'. Neither claims that population change causes development or that it measures it precisely — only that it is a sign from which development may be read, which is a claim easy to accept once the sentence is read carefully.

• (b)2 only — This option accepts the negation in statement 2 and rejects statement 1, which reverses the truth of both. The rejection of statement 1 usually comes from a good instinct badly applied: population change has many causes, some of them nothing to do with economics — a war, an epidemic, a natural disaster, a redrawing of administrative boundaries — so a candidate reasons that it cannot be a reliable economic indicator. But statement 1 does not claim reliability or exclusivity; it claims that population change is an important indicator, which it plainly is. Internal migration in India is overwhelmingly economic in motivation, and the districts and States that gain population through migration are the ones with work to offer. Accepting statement 2 compounds the error, because population change is an indicator of social upliftment as directly as it is of economic development: the fall in infant mortality and in fertility that accompanies rising female literacy and better health care is a change in population, and it is read as social progress everywhere it occurs.
• (c)Both 1 and 2 — Choosing both statements means accepting that population change indicates economic development while denying that it indicates social upliftment, and there is no coherent basis for that division. The two statements are not formal contradictions — one is about economic development and the other about social upliftment — which is exactly why this option is dangerous: a candidate who reads them as compatible may accept both without noticing that the second one carries a negation at all. The mechanisms that make population change an economic indicator are the same mechanisms that make it a social one. Falling death rates reflect nutrition and public health; falling birth rates reflect education, urbanisation and the status of women; migration reflects both the pull of employment and the push of social conditions. In the standard textbook formulation, population change is an indicator of the economic development, the social upliftment and the historical and cultural background of a region — all three together, not the first at the expense of the second.
• (d)Neither 1 nor 2 — Rejecting both statements is the choice of a candidate who has decided that the whole idea is too loose to be examinable — that population change is driven by too many things to indicate anything in particular. That scepticism is misplaced here for two reasons. The first is textual: statement 2 is already a denial, so rejecting it amounts to asserting that population change is an indicator of social upliftment, which sits oddly beside also rejecting statement 1. Reading a negative statement as false is a step that has to be taken deliberately, and a candidate who marks both statements false without noticing that they point in opposite directions has almost certainly not registered the negation. The second is substantive: demography is one of the principal evidence bases for measuring development, and indicators built directly on population change — the infant mortality rate, life expectancy at birth, the total fertility rate, the sex ratio — appear in every serious assessment of how a region is faring.

Population change in an area over a period is the sum of natural increase and net migration. Natural increase is births minus deaths; net migration is in-migration minus out-migration. Because those three flows respond to conditions on the ground, population change works as an indicator of the wider condition of a region — its economic development, its social progress and even its historical and cultural background. The mechanism running through the whole topic is the demographic transition. In the first stage both birth rates and death rates are high and growth is slow. In the second, death rates fall sharply as food supply, sanitation and medicine improve while birth rates stay high, and population grows rapidly. In the third, birth rates fall too, as education spreads, families urbanise, infant survival improves and the economic calculus of having children changes, so growth slows. In the fourth, both rates are low and population is roughly stable. Every one of those transitions is simultaneously economic and social, which is why population data serve as evidence for both. The specific indicators built on population change are the ones to know: the crude birth rate and crude death rate, the total fertility rate, the infant mortality rate, life expectancy at birth, the sex ratio and the child sex ratio, the literacy rate and the rate of urbanisation. Alongside them sit measures of distribution rather than of change — population density, the rural-urban split — which describe how people are spread rather than how their numbers are moving, and the two must not be confused.

This item belongs to the polity, governance and economy stretch that carries the paper to its close, and its content comes straight from the standard school treatment of population geography, where population change is presented as an indicator of economic development, social upliftment and the historical and cultural background of a region. The examiner has taken that sentence, split it, affirmed one half and denied the other, and asked the candidate to sort them out. Two features of the construction deserve attention because they recur. First, the code set — one only, two only, both, neither — appears on eleven questions in this booklet, which is more than twice as often as on the companion paper, so it is worth practising the discipline of marking each statement true or false independently before looking at the code. Second, and more important, this is one of only two places in the paper where a negation appears in ordinary weight inside a statement under a positive ask. Everywhere else a 'not' that matters is printed in bold italics in the stem. That is a trap of a particular kind: it punishes not carelessness but a habit the same paper has spent seventeen questions teaching. The defence is procedural rather than clever — read every statement of a statement-set item word by word and decide its truth on its own, then look at what the stem is asking for, and never let the presence or absence of typographic emphasis stand in for reading.

• Population change in an area is the sum of natural increase, which is births minus deaths, and net migration, which is in-migration minus out-migration. Because all three flows respond to conditions in the region, population change serves as an indicator of economic development, of social upliftment and of the historical and cultural background of that region.
• Statement 1 of this item is correct and statement 2 is incorrect. Population change is an indicator of social upliftment as much as of economic development: falling infant mortality, rising life expectancy, falling fertility and rising age at marriage are all components or consequences of population change and all are read as evidence of social progress.
• The demographic transition describes the movement from high birth and death rates to low ones in four stages: high birth and high death with slow growth; falling death rates with high birth rates and rapid growth; falling birth rates with slowing growth; and low rates of both with a roughly stable population. Each transition is economic and social at the same time.
• Indicators built directly on population change include the crude birth rate, the crude death rate, the total fertility rate, the infant mortality rate, life expectancy at birth and the sex ratio. Measures such as population density and the rural-urban split describe distribution rather than change and answer a different question.
• The word both statements use is 'indicator', not 'cause' or 'measure'. A claim that something is an important indicator is far weaker than a claim that it determines or precisely quantifies development, and rejecting statement 1 on the ground that population change has many non-economic causes is answering a stronger claim than the one printed.

• Expecting a negation to be signalled in bold. Seventeen stems in this booklet print a bold italic 'not' when the ask is negative; here the ask is positive and the 'not' sits inside statement 2 in ordinary weight, so the typography that has been reliable all paper offers no warning at all.
• Reading the two statements as saying the same thing. They differ in two ways at once — one speaks of economic development and the other of social upliftment, and the second is a denial where the first is an assertion — so a candidate who skims will accept both and choose the wrong code.
• Rejecting statement 1 because population change has many causes. The statement claims only that population change is an important indicator, not that it is a precise or exclusive measure of economic development, and the weaker claim is easy to accept.
• Treating population density as a component of population change. Density is a measure of how people are distributed at a moment in time; change is a movement over a period, and its components are births, deaths and migration.

Statement-set items on population and human development appear in every recent paper of this kind, and they are built in a few standard ways. The commonest, used here, takes a sentence from a standard textbook, splits it into two propositions and negates one of them, so that the item can be answered with certainty by anybody who recognises the source and only with difficulty by anybody who does not. A second form pairs a definition with a consequence — what an indicator measures and what a change in it implies — and asks which holds. A third gives two statements linked as claim and reason, though this particular booklet contains no assertion-reason items at all. In each case the mechanics matter more than the geography: mark each statement true or false separately, watch for a negation inside a statement rather than in the ask, and only then read the code. Since the four-option code set is identical across eleven questions in this paper, the reading discipline transfers directly from one to the next and is worth practising as a routine.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following is NOT a component of population change in an area?

  • (a)Births occurring in the area
  • (b)Deaths occurring in the area
  • (c)Migration into and out of the area
  • (d)The population density of the area

  Answer(d) The population density of the area — density is the number of persons per unit of area at a point in time, a measure of how a population is distributed rather than of how its size is changing. Population change over a period is the sum of natural increase, which is births minus deaths, and net migration, which is in-migration minus out-migration; the first three options are exactly those components.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Consider the following statements about the demographic transition: 1. In the first stage both the birth rate and the death rate are high, so the population grows slowly. 2. In the third stage the birth rate declines while the death rate remains low, so the rate of population growth falls. Which of the above statements is/are correct?

  • (a)1 only
  • (b)2 only
  • (c)Both 1 and 2
  • (d)Neither 1 nor 2

  Answer(c) Both 1 and 2 — in the first stage of the transition high birth rates are offset by high death rates and growth is slow; the second stage brings a sharp fall in death rates while birth rates stay high, producing rapid growth; in the third stage birth rates fall as education, urbanisation and improved infant survival change family decisions, so growth slows; and in the fourth both rates are low and the population is roughly stable.