MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 21 of 100

Correct — option (1), the pairing (a) - (i), (b) - (ii), (c) - (iii), (d) - (iv). The left column is the census year and the right column is the crude death rate per 1,000 population, and the pairing that matters is 1981 with 15, 1991 with 11, 2001 with 08 and 2011 with 07. The two columns are printed side by side because the reader has to match them; the fact that (a) sits opposite (i) on the page proves nothing, and the pairing has to be argued from the demography. That argument is short and decisive. India's death rate has fallen in every intercensal decade since Independence — there is no decade in this period in which mortality rose — so a set of four values attached to four ascending census years must run in strictly descending order. Test the four options against that single rule and three of them collapse at once: option (2) makes the death rate climb from 11 in 1981 to 15 in 1991, option (3) makes it fall to 07 in 2001 and then jump back up to 11 in 2011, and option (4) reverses the entire series so that mortality rises steadily from 07 in 1981 to 15 in 2011. Only option (1) reads 15, 11, 08, 07 — the monotonic decline the demographic record actually shows. The magnitudes are the standard decadal figures carried in population-geography tables: roughly 15 per 1,000 in 1981, about 11 in 1991, about 8 in 2001 and about 7 in 2011. Notice also that the decline decelerates — a drop of 4 points across the 1980s, 3 across the 1990s, but only 1 across the 2000s. That flattening is not an error in the data; it is what happens as a death rate approaches its floor, because a crude death rate cannot fall much below about 6 or 7 per 1,000 once the easily preventable deaths of infancy and infectious disease have been removed and an ageing age-structure begins to push the crude figure back up.

• (2)(a) - (ii), (b) - (i), (c) - (iv), (d) - (iii) — This pairing gives 1981 a death rate of 11 and 1991 a death rate of 15, which would mean mortality in India rose over the 1980s — a decade in which the expanded immunisation programme, the spread of oral rehydration therapy and improving food availability were all pushing it down. It then has the rate falling to 07 by 2001 and rising again to 08 by 2011. Two reversals in one series is the signature of an option assembled to look plausible rather than one that tracks the actual record, and either reversal on its own is enough to reject it.
• (3)(a) - (i), (b) - (iii), (c) - (iv), (d) - (ii) — This option starts correctly with 1981 at 15 and is therefore the most dangerous of the three wrong pairings — a candidate who checks only the first pair will accept it. But it then crashes the rate to 08 by 1991 and 07 by 2001 before sending it back up to 11 in 2011, which would mean India's death rate was higher in 2011 than in 1991. Nothing in the intercensal record supports a rise of that size in the 2000s. The lesson is procedural: on a match question, verify every pair, because the wrong options are built to agree with the right one on the pair a hurried candidate is most likely to check.
• (4)(a) - (iv), (b) - (iii), (c) - (ii), (d) - (i) — This is the correct series read backwards: 07 in 1981, 08 in 1991, 11 in 2001, 15 in 2011. It is internally consistent and perfectly monotonic, which is exactly what makes it a trap for anyone who remembers that the numbers form an orderly progression but not which way it runs. Attaching a death rate of 15 per 1,000 to 2011 would put India's mortality in that year at a level it had already left behind three decades earlier, and would imply the country's demographic transition ran in reverse.

The crude death rate is the number of deaths in a year per 1,000 people in the population, and its long fall is the first half of the demographic transition. In a pre-transition society both birth and death rates are high and the population grows slowly; the transition begins when mortality falls — through control of epidemics and famine, immunisation, antibiotics, safe water, and better nutrition — while fertility, which is governed by social custom rather than by medicine, keeps to its old level for a generation or more. The widening gap between a birth rate that has not yet moved and a death rate that has collapsed is the natural increase that produced India's population surge. India's death rate had already done most of its falling by 1981; what the 1981-2011 stretch in this question shows is the tail of that decline, from 15 down to 7 per 1,000. Because the crude rate is not standardised for age, it has a floor: once infant and infectious-disease mortality are largely removed, the deaths that remain are the deaths of an ageing population, and a country with a growing share of elderly people can see its crude death rate stop falling — or even rise — while life expectancy continues to improve.

MPSC likes to test the demographic transition through a table rather than a definition, because a table exposes whether the candidate has memorised a shape or only a phrase. The habit worth building here is to reason from direction before reasoning from magnitude: on any question that pairs a time series with a set of values, first ask which way the quantity moves, and eliminate every option that violates it. On this question that single test settles the answer without recalling a single digit, because only one of the four pairings runs downhill. It is also worth keeping the companion series in mind — India's birth rate over the same decades falls too, but more slowly and from a level that stayed above the death rate throughout, which is why the population continued to grow across all four census years even as mortality dropped by more than half.

• The crude death rate is deaths per 1,000 population in a year; the crude birth rate is births per 1,000, and the difference between them is the rate of natural increase.
• The decadal series this question uses — about 15 per 1,000 in 1981, 11 in 1991, 08 in 2001 and 07 in 2011 — falls at every step, and the fall gets smaller each decade as the rate approaches its floor.
• Between censuses, India's birth and death rates are estimated by the Sample Registration System run by the Office of the Registrar General of India; different published series round and revise these figures slightly, so the direction of change is a safer anchor in an exam than the exact digit.
• A falling death rate combined with a slower-falling birth rate is the classic middle stage of the demographic transition and is what drove India's high population growth through the second half of the twentieth century.
• The crude death rate is not adjusted for age structure, so an ageing population can hold it steady or push it up even while life expectancy rises — which is why it cannot keep falling indefinitely.

• Reading the two printed columns as already paired because they sit side by side on the page — adjacency in a match question is typography, never an answer
• Checking only the first pair of an option: the wrong pairings here are deliberately built to agree with the correct one on the pair a candidate checks first
• Accepting a perfectly ordered but reversed series, which looks reassuringly systematic and is exactly the shape option (4) takes
• Confusing the death rate series with the birth rate series — both fall across these decades, but the birth rate stays the higher of the two throughout

MPSC returns repeatedly to India's and Maharashtra's demographic indicators — birth rate, death rate, sex ratio, density, literacy — and asks them either as a match-the-columns grid like this one or as a set of statements to be marked true or false. The values quoted are usually rounded whole numbers for census years, so the reliable preparation is to hold the shape of each series (which way it moves, roughly how fast, and where it sits at the last census) rather than a decimal figure that different sources report differently. When the question is a grid, the fastest route is almost always to test each option against the direction of the trend before checking any individual value.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In the demographic transition, the phase of most rapid population growth occurs when which of the following is true ?

  • (a)Both the birth rate and the death rate are high
  • (b)The death rate has fallen sharply while the birth rate is still high
  • (c)The birth rate has fallen sharply while the death rate is still high
  • (d)Both the birth rate and the death rate are low

  Answer(b) The death rate has fallen sharply while the birth rate is still high — mortality responds quickly to medicine, sanitation and food security, while fertility is governed by social custom and lags behind by a generation or more. The gap between the two is the rate of natural increase, and it is widest in this middle stage. When both rates are high, or both are low, growth is slow.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following best explains why a country's crude death rate can stop falling even while its life expectancy continues to rise ?

  • (a)Because the crude death rate counts only deaths from infectious disease
  • (b)Because the crude death rate is not adjusted for the age structure of the population
  • (c)Because the crude death rate is measured per 100 people rather than per 1,000
  • (d)Because the crude death rate excludes infant deaths

  Answer(b) Because the crude death rate is not adjusted for the age structure of the population — as a population ages, the share of people in the high-mortality older age groups grows, which holds the crude rate up even though death rates within each age group are still improving. The crude rate counts all deaths, including infant deaths, and is expressed per 1,000 population.