Match List–I with List–II :
List—I (Footwear/Fashion Accessory)
a. Beret
b. Stilettos
c. Aviators
d. Chignon
e. Brogue
List—II (Description)
1. A type of men’s footwear
2. A type of sunglasses
3. A ty

Question

Match List–I with List–II :
List—I (Footwear/Fashion Accessory)
a. Beret
b. Stilettos
c. Aviators
d. Chignon
e. Brogue
List—II (Description)
1. A type of men’s footwear
2. A type of sunglasses
3. A type of hat
4. A type of women’s footwear
5. A type of hairstyle
Select the correct answer using the codes given below.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, a b c d e / 3 4 2 5 1. Take the five items one at a time and the code assembles itself. A beret is a hat — a soft, brimless cap with a flat crown, traditionally made by felting knitted wool so that it holds its shape without a stiffener, worn for centuries by shepherds in the Basque country of the western Pyrenees and adopted through the twentieth century as military headgear across the world, the Indian Army included, where the colour of the beret marks the arm or the regiment. So a matches 3. Stilettos are women's footwear — a shoe defined not by its upper but by its heel, which is very high and so slender that it is named after the stiletto, the narrow needle-pointed Italian dagger; the style came into fashion in the early 1950s through the Paris houses, Roger Vivier working for Christian Dior among them. So b matches 4. Aviators are sunglasses — the teardrop-lensed glasses designed in the 1930s for pilots of the United States Army Air Corps, whose unusually large lens was a functional requirement rather than a style, since it had to cover the whole range of movement of the eye so that a pilot glancing up towards the sun in an open or glazed cockpit was still shaded; they went on public sale from 1937 under the Ray-Ban name. So c matches 2. A chignon is a hairstyle — the hair gathered, twisted and coiled into a knot pinned at the nape of the neck, from the French chignon du cou, literally 'nape of the neck'; it is the same arrangement Indian usage calls a juda, and it is old enough to appear on Greek statuary. So d matches 5. A brogue is men's footwear — a sturdy low-heeled leather shoe identified by broguing, the rows of punched perforations that run along its seams and across its toe cap. Those holes are a fossil of a function: they began as drainage on the untanned shoes worn over the wet ground and peat bogs of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, and the word itself is simply the Irish bróg and Scottish Gaelic bròg, meaning shoe. Modern brogues are graded by how far the perforated toe cap runs — full or wingtip, semi, quarter — and although the style is now worn by everyone, the classification the setter has used, men's footwear, is the standard one. So e matches 1. The sequence a-3, b-4, c-2, d-5, e-1 is precisely option (b), and no other code on the paper produces it.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The dangerous one, because it opens correctly. It reads beret as 3, a type of hat, which is right, and a candidate who checks only the first pair before marking will lose the mark here. Everything after that is displaced: it makes stilettos 2, a type of sun-glasses, aviators 1, a type of men's footwear, chignon 4, a type of women's footwear, and brogue 5, a type of hairstyle. Four of the five pairs are wrong, and the pattern is instructive — the three descriptions 1, 2 and 3 have simply been rotated among the first three items, which is how a setter builds a decoy that looks orderly. Check a second pair before you commit to any matching code.  (c) Gets two pairs right — aviators as 2, a type of sun-glasses, and brogue as 1, a type of men's footwear — and wrecks the other three. It makes the beret 5, a type of hairstyle, the stilettos 3, a type of hat, and the chignon 4, a type of women's footwear. A candidate who knows only that a beret is something worn on the head rather than something done with the hair eliminates this option in a second, which is why beret is the right pair to anchor on.  (d) The identity code, 1-2-3-4-5, that almost every matching item carries in the hope that a candidate short of time will take the tidy-looking answer. Read as printed it makes a beret a type of men's footwear, stilettos a type of sun-glasses and aviators a type of hat, all plainly wrong; only the fourth and fifth positions would need checking, and chignon as women's footwear fails too. A serial code is a prompt to verify rather than to assume, and its presence is a prompt to verify the very first pair and move on.

Concept: Every one of these five words is a common noun of international English that has entered Indian usage through clothing, the armed services and the cinema, and each is defined by one distinguishing feature rather than by a brand or a maker. A beret is defined by its flat crown and the absence of a brim; a stiletto by the height and thinness of its heel, not by the rest of the shoe; aviators by the teardrop lens shape that grew out of a functional need in the cockpit; a chignon by where the hair is gathered, at the nape rather than on the crown; a brogue by the perforated decoration called broguing. Two of the five are footwear, one is worn on the head, one over the eyes, and one is not an object at all but an arrangement of hair — and that deliberate spread across categories is the design of the question. Notice also how often the origin of such a word is functional and only later decorative: broguing began as drainage holes, the aviator's oversized lens began as glare protection for military pilots, the beret's felted wool began as weatherproofing for shepherds. There is a physics footnote worth carrying out of this question, because the same idea is examined directly in general science. Pressure is force divided by area, so the thinner the heel the larger the pressure it delivers. A stiletto heel may end in a tip of about one square centimetre; a person of 60 kg resting weight on that single tip loads it at roughly 60 kilograms per square centimetre. An elephant of five tonnes spreads its weight over four broad pads of perhaps a thousand square centimetres each, giving barely more than one kilogram per square centimetre — so the heel presses some forty to fifty times harder than the elephant does. That is exactly why stiletto heels are barred from certain museum galleries, aircraft cabins and old timber floors.

State PCS 2023 Q42 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q42 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer