EPFO EO/AO 2023 General Ability Test · Question 119 of 120

Correct — B, (b) A database of the financial performance of companies that is specially designed for academia. The term names a product of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, and the option reproduces the product's own description of itself almost word for word. Prowess is that organisation's database of the financial performance of Indian companies, and the version referred to here is its academic interface, described by its publisher as the Prowess data extraction interface for academia. Its content is company financial data: profit and loss accounts, balance sheets, financial ratios, cash flow statements for listed companies, quarterly results, share prices and corporate actions, covering tens of thousands of Indian companies of every size and ownership type with time series running back to 1990. It is delivered in a plain text form suited to statistical work, which is why it is the standard raw material for empirical research on Indian corporate finance in universities and business schools. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy is a private economic research and information company, and Prowess is only one of its outputs. It also runs the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey, from which its widely quoted employment and unemployment estimates are drawn, and a database tracking announced and completed investment projects. Knowing that the organisation is a private data house rather than a government body is often enough to place any term attached to its name. A note on the printing: the booklet sets the term with the letters dx lowered as a subscript after the word Prowess. A subscript cannot be represented in the plain text of this card, so it appears here as a single word, and the stem is otherwise exactly as the Commission printed it. The question is of the 'best describes the term' kind, and its four options are drawn from four unrelated areas of computing and data. Only one of them is about company financial data, which is the whole discrimination.

• (a)A special-purpose supercomputer with a hardware architecture dedicated to a single problem — This describes a real category of machine, one built for a single class of computation rather than for general work, but it has nothing to do with a financial database. The option is there to catch a candidate who reads an unfamiliar technical-looking name and assumes it must be hardware. India's own supercomputing effort runs through the National Supercomputing Mission, under which the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing has built the PARAM series of machines, and those are general-purpose systems serving academic and research institutions across many disciplines rather than machines dedicated to one problem.
• (c)A computing machine that uses the properties of quantum physics to store data and perform computation — This is an accurate description of a quantum computer, which relies on quantum-mechanical properties such as superposition and entanglement to represent and process information, and it is a real subject of policy attention: the Union Cabinet approved a National Quantum Mission in April 2023 with an outlay of about ₹ 6,003.65 crore for the period to 2030-31, covering quantum computing, communication, sensing and materials. It is nonetheless a definition attached to the wrong name here. This is the standard construction of a 'best describes' item, in which every option is a correct definition of something and the candidate must know which something the term belongs to.
• (d)A database in which collection and storing of data is done on user's system and this is basically designed for a single user — This is a textbook definition of a personal or desktop database, the kind that lives on one machine and serves one user, and it appears in every introductory database syllabus alongside centralised, distributed and cloud databases. It is the most dangerous of the three wrong options because it is at least in the right subject area: the term being defined is indeed a database. The discrimination is between a single-user desktop database and a large commercial financial database licensed to institutions, and the phrase in the correct option that settles it is 'financial performance of companies', which describes content, while this option describes only architecture.

Prowess is the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy's database of the financial performance of Indian companies, and its academic interface is the version supplied to universities and research institutions. The data are drawn from company accounts and stock exchange disclosures and are normalised into a common format, which is what makes them usable for statistical work: profit and loss accounts, balance sheets, cash flow statements, ratios, quarterly results, share prices and corporate actions, for a very large number of listed and unlisted Indian companies, with series extending back to the beginning of the 1990s. Because the coverage is long and consistent, the database has become the standard source for empirical research on Indian corporate finance, industrial organisation and the effects of economic reform. The publisher is a private economic information company rather than a public body, and its other outputs are known independently: the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey, a large panel survey of households that yields frequently cited estimates of employment and unemployment, and a database of announced, commissioned and abandoned investment projects. Setting these against the official sources is a useful exercise in itself, since the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation's Periodic Labour Force Survey and the Reserve Bank's company finance studies cover overlapping ground with different methods, and the differences between them are a recurring subject of public debate.

The final block of the EO/AO General Ability Test is current affairs, and one of its standard shapes is the 'sometimes seen in news' term, where four confident-sounding definitions are offered and only one belongs to the term. The examiner is not testing depth of knowledge about the item named; the candidate who has simply seen the name in the right context can answer in seconds, while the candidate who has not must guess. The habit rewarded is breadth of reading with placement attached: for every unfamiliar name encountered in the business or technology pages, note what kind of thing it is and who is behind it, since that is exactly what these items ask.

• Prowess is the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy's database of the financial performance of Indian companies.
• The academic version is described by its publisher as the Prowess data extraction interface for academia, specially designed for academia.
• Its content includes profit and loss accounts, balance sheets, financial ratios, cash flow statements, quarterly results, share prices and corporate actions.
• It covers tens of thousands of Indian companies with time series running back to 1990.
• The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy is a private economic research and information company, not a government body.
• Its other well-known outputs are the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey and a database of investment projects.
• The booklet prints the term with the letters dx as a subscript following the word Prowess.
• India's National Supercomputing Mission has produced the PARAM series of general-purpose machines through the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.
• The National Quantum Mission was approved by the Union Cabinet in April 2023 with an outlay of about ₹ 6,003.65 crore for the period to 2030-31.

• Assuming a technical-sounding name must refer to hardware rather than to a data product.
• Choosing an option because it is a correct definition, without asking whether it defines the term in the stem.
• Confusing a large licensed commercial database with a single-user desktop database.
• Treating a private data provider's statistics as official government statistics.
• Overlooking the subscript in the printed name and searching memory for a different word.

The 'sometimes seen in news' item is one of the most frequent shapes in the EO/AO current-affairs block. It offers four self-contained definitions, each accurate as a description of something, and asks which fits the named term. Because guessing is expensive under negative marking, the return on wide but shallow reading is high here: knowing merely that a name belongs to economics rather than to computing is often enough to eliminate three options. Keep a running note of names encountered in the news with a single word of placement attached to each.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Consumer Pyramids Household Survey, frequently cited for its employment estimates, is conducted by :

  • (a)The National Statistical Office
  • (b)The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy
  • (c)The Reserve Bank of India
  • (d)The Securities and Exchange Board of India

  Answer(b) The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy

• practice — not a real PYQ

  A database in which the data are collected and stored on a single user's own machine is best described as :

  • (a)A distributed database
  • (b)A personal or desktop database
  • (c)A cloud database
  • (d)A centralised enterprise database

  Answer(b) A personal or desktop database