NDA (II) 2016 General Ability Test · Question 117 of 150

Correct — C, both 1 and 2. Statement 1 tracks the arc of British expansion: through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Britain moved from trading posts to territorial rule across India, took Canada and large parts of Africa, settled Australia and New Zealand, and by the later nineteenth century governed the largest empire in history. The loss of the thirteen American colonies in 1783 was a break in the story, not a reversal of it. Statement 2 is a fact of climate. Cotton is a warm-climate crop and cannot be grown commercially in Britain, so every bale that fed the mills of Lancashire had to arrive by sea — from the West Indies and the American South, and from India and Egypt. That dependence is precisely what ties the two statements together, since securing raw materials and markets was a large part of what the empire was for.

• (a)1 only — It denies statement 2, which is not really open to argument. Britain's climate does not support commercial cotton cultivation, and the raw cotton trade — the American South before its civil war, and India and Egypt after it — is one of the best-documented supply chains of the nineteenth century.
• (b)2 only — It denies statement 1. Some candidates reject it because the American colonies were lost in 1783, but that setback was followed by a far larger expansion in India, Africa and the Pacific, so the overall growth of British colonialism across the two centuries is not in doubt.
• (d)Neither 1 nor 2 — Both statements are true, so this option cannot stand. It is the option to avoid whenever both claims are broad, uncontroversial textbook generalisations rather than precise numerical assertions.

The Industrial Revolution and the British Empire grew together and fed each other. Mechanised spinning and weaving multiplied Britain's demand for raw cotton far beyond anything domestic agriculture could have supplied even in a suitable climate, and they multiplied its output of cheap cloth far beyond what the home market could absorb. Colonies and colonial trade supplied the first and took the second. India shows both halves of the exchange: it exported raw cotton to Britain while its own handloom weavers were undercut by machine-made British cloth.

The item is really a test of whether a student can hold two familiar generalisations at once instead of hunting for a hidden catch. Both statements are the sort of broad claim that textbooks state outright, and neither carries a date, a number or a superlative that could be falsified. A useful working rule for statement-pairs of this kind is to look for the falsifier — a specific figure, a named year, an 'only' or a 'first' — and when there is none in either statement, 'both correct' is usually where the key lands. On the cotton point, remember the sequence that made India's role change: American cotton dominated British imports until the American Civil War of the 1860s cut off that supply, after which Indian and Egyptian cotton took much of its place.

• Cotton is a warm-climate crop that cannot be grown commercially in Britain, so the entire raw material of the cotton industry was imported.
• British territorial expansion continued through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Africa despite the loss of the American colonies in 1783.
• The American Civil War of the 1860s interrupted American cotton supplies and raised the share taken from India and Egypt.
• Cheap machine-made British cloth undercut Indian handloom weaving in the first half of the nineteenth century, the process usually called de-industrialisation.

• Rejecting statement 1 on the strength of American independence in 1783, which was a single reverse inside a long expansion.
• Looking for a hidden error in broad statements that contain no date, figure or superlative to be wrong about.

Two-statement items of this type are a GAT staple; when both statements are general textbook claims with no falsifiable specifics, the key usually accepts both.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  British imports of raw cotton shifted substantially towards India and Egypt in the 1860s mainly because of

  • (a)the opening of the Suez Canal
  • (b)the American Civil War
  • (c)the abolition of slavery in the West Indies
  • (d)the invention of the power loom

  Answer(b) the American Civil War — it cut off supplies from the American South and forced British mills to look elsewhere.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The term 'de-industrialisation' as applied to nineteenth-century India refers to

  • (a)the closure of British-owned factories in India
  • (b)the decline of traditional handicrafts, especially handloom weaving, under competition from machine-made imports
  • (c)the shifting of Indian industry from cities to villages
  • (d)the refusal of Indian merchants to invest in industry

  Answer(b) the decline of traditional handicrafts, especially handloom weaving, under competition from machine-made imports.