MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 49 of 100

Correct — option (3), statement (c) alone. Read the stem before anything else: it asks which of the four items is NOT a Millennium Development Goal, and the word 'not' is printed in bold in the English column and 'नाही' in bold in the Marathi. This is an inverted question, so the three items that ARE goals have to be discarded and the one that is not is the answer. Write the inversion down before touching the list, because everything that follows is the opposite of the habit a candidate has built on ordinary items. Now the list itself. The eight Millennium Development Goals, adopted after the Millennium Summit of September 2000 with 2015 as their target year, are: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for development. Set the four printed items against that list. 'Achieve universal primary education' is Goal 2, reproduced word for word. 'Promotion of gender equality' is the first half of Goal 3. 'Ensure environmental sustainability' is Goal 7, again word for word. Three of the four are on the list, so three of the four are discarded. That leaves 'Reducing infant mortality', and it is not one of the eight. The goal about the deaths of the young is titled 'Reduce child mortality', and its headline target was to reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the UNDER-FIVE mortality rate — a different measure from the infant mortality rate, which counts deaths before the first birthday. Be precise about the relationship rather than vague: the infant mortality rate was one of the indicators tracked beneath that goal in the United Nations framework, so infant deaths were certainly being counted. But the item asks about the list of goals, and the list of goals is short, fixed and quotable; 'reducing infant mortality' is not one of its eight entries, while 'reduce child mortality' is. Statement (c) alone is therefore the odd one out, and the row that says so is option (3).

• (1)(a) only — This option nominates 'Achieve universal primary education' as the item that is not a Millennium Development Goal, and it is Goal 2 of the eight, reproduced in the paper word for word. The goal's target was to ensure that by 2015 children everywhere, boys and girls alike, would complete a full course of primary schooling, and it is the goal India most often reported against through Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the Right to Education Act. Two things produce this answer. One is a straightforward failure to invert: a candidate who reads the stem as asking which items ARE goals will pick the one that comes first and looks most obviously like a goal. The other is a vague memory that education appears in the successor framework as Sustainable Development Goal 4, 'Quality Education', with the inference that it must therefore be new. It is not new; the SDG widened the MDG from access to primary schooling into quality and lifelong learning, which is a change of scope and not an arrival.
• (2)(a) and (b) only — This option rejects two items that are both on the list. 'Achieve universal primary education' is Goal 2 verbatim, and 'promotion of gender equality' is the first half of Goal 3, whose full text reads 'Promote gender equality and empower women'. A candidate may hesitate over statement (b) because the paper prints only half the goal, turning the verb into a noun and dropping the empowerment clause; that is a paraphrase, not a departure, and paraphrase is how examiners normally print list items. The deeper cause of this answer is usually the failure to invert the stem — a candidate who is quietly answering 'which of these ARE goals' will find two familiar development phrases and choose the row that contains them. This is why the inversion has to be written down. In a negative item every judgment made about a statement has to be turned over once more before it reaches the option rows, and the second turn is the one that gets skipped under time pressure.
• (4)(c) and (d) only — This is the most dangerous option in the set, because it is half right. It correctly identifies statement (c) as not being one of the eight goals, and then adds statement (d), which is Goal 7 in the United Nations' own words: 'Ensure environmental sustainability'. A candidate reaches this row by a plausible-sounding argument — that the environment belongs to the Sustainable Development Goals of 2015 rather than to the older poverty-focused framework — and the argument is simply wrong on the record. Environmental sustainability was one of the eight from the beginning, with targets on reversing the loss of environmental resources, on halving the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation, and on improving the lives of slum dwellers. What this option really tests is whether a candidate stops once they have found one item that satisfies the stem. In an inverted question with a single genuine outlier, the temptation to add a second is strong, and the discipline is to check every remaining item against the printed list rather than against an impression of what the framework was about.

The Millennium Development Goals came out of the Millennium Declaration adopted at the United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000 and ran to a target year of 2015, with 1990 as the baseline against which progress was measured. There were eight goals, each carrying time-bound targets and a set of indicators beneath them: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for development. The first seven were addressed largely to developing countries and the eighth to the richer ones, covering aid, trade access and debt relief, which is why the framework is sometimes described as a compact between the two. India reported against the goals through the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, and the domestic programmes that carried them are familiar — Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and later the Right to Education Act for Goal 2, the National Rural Health Mission for Goals 4 and 5, the National AIDS Control Programme for Goal 6, and the drinking water and sanitation missions for the water and sanitation targets under Goal 7. When the goals expired at the end of 2015 they were succeeded by the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, adopted on 25 September 2015 and in force from 1 January 2016, which are universal rather than aimed at developing countries and reach into consumption, inequality, industry, cities, oceans and institutions as well as the older concerns.

This is one of seven questions in this paper whose stem is negative or exclusionary, and five of the seven print the negation in bold in both language columns, this one among them, while one bolds it in the English column only and one bolds it in neither. That emphasis, where it is applied, is genuinely visible on the page, and a candidate should train the eye to catch it, but the emphasis is not a substitute for the habit: the safe method is to circle the negating word and write a small 'NOT' beside the question number before reading the statements, so that the inversion survives the two minutes spent on the list. Questions built on a fixed enumerated list are the Commission's favourite vehicle for a negative stem, because such a list makes an unambiguous key possible — an item either appears in the eight goals or it does not, and there is nothing to argue about afterwards. That also tells a candidate how to prepare: for every enumerated framework in the syllabus, learn the entries in the framework's own words rather than in your own, because a paraphrase that is close enough for a positive question can be fatal in a negative one. Note finally that the English stem prints 'Goal(MDG)' with no space before the bracket, and that the Marathi column writes 'उद्दीष्टांमधे'. Both are reproduced here as printed; neither affects the sense.

• The eight Millennium Development Goals are: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for development.
• The goals came from the Millennium Declaration adopted at the Millennium Summit in September 2000, took 1990 as their baseline and 2015 as their target year, and were succeeded by the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals in force from 1 January 2016.
• Goal 4 is titled 'Reduce child mortality' and its headline target was to reduce by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015 the under-five mortality rate; the infant mortality rate, which counts deaths before the first birthday, was one of the indicators tracked beneath it rather than a goal of its own.
• Three of the four items printed in this question are on the list — 'achieve universal primary education' is Goal 2, 'promote gender equality' is the first half of Goal 3, and 'ensure environmental sustainability' is Goal 7 — which is why the stem's negation matters so much here.
• Goal 7 carried targets on reversing the loss of environmental resources, halving the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation, and improving the lives of slum dwellers, so the environment was part of the framework from the beginning and not an SDG-era addition.

• Answering the positive question when a negative one was asked — five of this paper's seven negative stems print the negation in bold in both columns and two do not, and the emphasis is still missed under time pressure
• Stopping at the first item that satisfies a negative stem and then adding a second that does not, which is exactly what the half-right option in this set is built to catch
• Assuming environmental concerns belong only to the Sustainable Development Goals, when 'ensure environmental sustainability' was one of the original eight
• Treating infant mortality and child mortality as interchangeable, when the goal names child mortality and its headline target is the under-five rate
• Learning an enumerated framework in your own paraphrase rather than in its official wording, which is survivable in a positive item and dangerous in a negative one

Enumerated international frameworks — the Millennium Development Goals, the Sustainable Development Goals, the missions under the National Action Plan on Climate Change, the fundamental duties — are the standard raw material for negative and matching questions in MPSC papers, because a fixed list makes an unarguable key. The shapes to expect are three. The first prints several items and asks which is not on the list, as here, with the outlier usually a near-miss rather than something absurd: a real concept from the same field, worded just off the official title. The second asks for the number of a specific goal, which is pure list recall. The third sets goals against the years, summits or agencies attached to them in a match-the-columns grid. The preparation that answers all three is to write the list out once in its official words and to test yourself on the entries that are easiest to paraphrase wrongly, of which the mortality goal is the clearest example.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The headline target under the Millennium Development Goal on mortality among the young was to reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, which of the following ?

  • (a)The infant mortality rate
  • (b)The under-five mortality rate
  • (c)The neonatal mortality rate
  • (d)The maternal mortality ratio

  Answer(b) The under-five mortality rate — Goal 4 was titled 'Reduce child mortality' and its headline target was a two-thirds reduction in the under-five mortality rate between 1990 and 2015. The infant mortality rate, which counts deaths before the first birthday, was one of the indicators tracked beneath the goal rather than the target itself, and the neonatal rate counts deaths in the first month. The maternal mortality ratio belongs to Goal 5, 'Improve maternal health', whose target was a three-quarters reduction over the same period.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following was one of the eight Millennium Development Goals ?

  • (a)Reduced inequalities within and among countries
  • (b)Develop a global partnership for development
  • (c)Affordable and clean energy for all
  • (d)Peace, justice and strong institutions

  Answer(b) Develop a global partnership for development — this was Goal 8, the one addressed chiefly to the richer countries, covering development assistance, trade access, debt relief and access to essential medicines and technology. The other three options are Sustainable Development Goals from the framework that succeeded the MDGs in 2016: reduced inequalities is Goal 10, affordable and clean energy is Goal 7 and peace, justice and strong institutions is Goal 16, and none of them appears among the original eight.