MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 50 of 100

Correct — option (2), Asymmetry. The printed sentence is badly constructed and has to be read for its sense rather than its grammar, but the second half of it settles the answer on its own: a society in which a handful of individuals hold unlimited money is a society whose income distribution is lopsided, with a very large share of the total in the hands of a very small number of people. The word for a distribution shaped that way is asymmetric, and asymmetry is exactly what statisticians mean by skewness. Income distributions are in fact right-skewed almost everywhere: the great majority of earners are bunched near the bottom, a long thin tail stretches away to the right, and because a few very large incomes drag the average upward the mean income sits well above the median. That gap between mean and median is the arithmetic signature of the asymmetry the sentence describes, and it is the reason average income per head can rise in a country where the typical household feels no better off. The measurement apparatus built on this idea is the Lorenz curve, which plots the cumulative share of income against the cumulative share of the population, and the Gini coefficient derived from it: a perfectly symmetric, perfectly equal distribution traces the straight diagonal and scores zero, while the more asymmetric the distribution the further the curve sags away from that diagonal and the closer the coefficient moves to one. The blank is asking for the property that produces a concentration at the top, and only asymmetry names it.

• (1)Equality — Equality is the direct opposite of what the rest of the sentence describes. If income were distributed equally there would be no handful of individuals with unlimited money — every share would be the same, the Lorenz curve would coincide with the diagonal line of perfect equality, and the Gini coefficient would be zero. Filling the blank with equality makes the sentence contradict its own second clause, which is the clearest possible test that a fill-in-the-blank answer is wrong: read the completed sentence back and see whether its two halves agree.
• (3)Deficiency — Deficiency is a statement about a shortfall in quantity, not about the shape of a distribution. A society can suffer a deficiency of income in aggregate and still share what it has fairly evenly, and it can have no deficiency at all while a few people hold most of it — which is precisely the situation the sentence describes. The word also does not combine sensibly with 'income distribution', since a distribution is not the sort of thing that is in short supply; what is in short supply is income, and the sentence is about how income is spread rather than how much of it there is.
• (4)Abundance — Abundance likewise describes the total quantity of income rather than its spread across the population, and a society can be abundant and even-handed at the same time — indeed high average income and moderate inequality coexist in several countries. Reading the completed sentence back exposes the mismatch: an excessively abundant income distribution would say that there is a great deal of income, which leaves entirely open the question the sentence is actually asking, namely why so much of it sits with so few people.

Two quite different questions can be asked about a country's income: how much there is, and how it is spread. The first is answered by aggregates such as national income and income per head; the second requires the tools of distribution. The empirical starting point is that income distributions are asymmetric — positively skewed — in every society for which data exist. A histogram of incomes rises steeply, peaks well to the left, and then trails off in a long tail of high earners, so the arithmetic mean is pulled above the median and describes nobody in particular. Economists formalise the asymmetry with the Lorenz curve, which ranks the population from poorest to richest and plots the cumulative share of income they receive against the cumulative share of people; perfect equality traces the forty-five degree diagonal, and real distributions sag below it. The Gini coefficient measures the size of that sag, running from zero at perfect equality to one where a single person holds everything. Related descriptive tools include decile and quintile ratios, the share of the top one per cent, and the Kuznets hypothesis that inequality first rises and then falls as an economy industrialises. All of them are ways of putting a number on the same asymmetry this sentence is groping towards.

This item is a vocabulary question in economics clothing, and the paper carries several of the type: the stem is a sentence with a blank and the four choices are ordinary English words, only one of which fits the meaning of the completed sentence. The examination technique for such questions is mechanical and worth practising — insert each choice, read the whole sentence aloud in your head, and reject any completion whose halves contradict each other or that answers a different question from the one the sentence poses. That method is particularly valuable when the printed English is defective, as it is here, because it does not depend on parsing the grammar correctly. A candidate should also expect that in a bilingual paper the Marathi and English versions of a sentence may not be equally clear, and that the sense can be recovered from either.

• Income distributions are positively skewed, or asymmetric, in every society for which data exist: most earners cluster near the lower end while a long tail of very high incomes pulls the arithmetic mean above the median.
• The Lorenz curve plots the cumulative share of income against the cumulative share of the population; perfect equality is the forty-five degree diagonal, and the further the curve sags below it the more unequal the distribution.
• The Gini coefficient is derived from the Lorenz curve and runs from zero, where every share is identical, to one, where a single unit holds the entire income of the society.
• Because of this asymmetry, average income per head can rise while the typical household's income stagnates, which is why distributional measures are reported alongside aggregate growth figures.
• The Kuznets hypothesis proposes that inequality follows an inverted U as an economy industrialises, rising in the early phase and falling later, and it is one of the standard frames for discussing changes in the asymmetry of income over time.

• Reading only the blank and its immediate neighbours instead of the whole sentence, when the second clause is what fixes the answer
• Confusing statements about the amount of income with statements about its distribution, which is what two of the wrong choices here do
• Assuming a defective printed sentence must be a printing error to be worked around, when the intended sense is usually recoverable and the answer follows from it
• Treating a low average income as evidence of high inequality, or a high one as evidence of low inequality, when the two are separate properties

MPSC uses fill-in-the-blank vocabulary items throughout its economy section to test whether a candidate has the technical language rather than the arithmetic, and inequality supplies several of them — asymmetry, concentration, disparity, dispersion. The same theme returns in more demanding form as a question on the Lorenz curve or the Gini coefficient, where the candidate must know which way the curve bows and what the extreme values of the coefficient mean. It is worth being able to sketch the Lorenz diagram from memory, since a single picture answers most questions of that family.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In a Lorenz curve diagram, the line of perfect equality is represented by which of the following ?

  • (a)The horizontal axis
  • (b)The forty-five degree diagonal
  • (c)The vertical axis
  • (d)A curve bowed towards the lower right corner

  Answer(b) The forty-five degree diagonal — along it each cumulative percentage of the population receives exactly the same cumulative percentage of income, so the poorest ten per cent hold ten per cent of income and so on. Real distributions sag below this diagonal, and the greater the sag the higher the Gini coefficient derived from it.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Because the distribution of income in a society is positively skewed, which of the following relationships generally holds ?

  • (a)Mean income exceeds median income
  • (b)Median income exceeds mean income
  • (c)Mean and median income are equal
  • (d)Modal income exceeds mean income

  Answer(a) Mean income exceeds median income — a long right tail of very high incomes pulls the arithmetic average upward, while the median is unaffected by how far the top incomes stretch. This is why average income per head can rise even when the typical household's income has not moved, and why both figures are reported.