Who amongst the following was chosen as the 'Time Person of the Year, 2021' by the Internationally acclaimed magazine — Time ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), Elon Musk. Time named him its Person of the Year for 2021, announcing the choice on 13 December 2021. The magazine's editor-in-chief, Edward Felsenthal, set out the citation in these words: for creating solutions to an existential crisis, for embodying the possibilities and the perils of the age of tech titans, for driving society's most daring and disruptive transformations, Elon Musk is Time's 2021 Person of the Year. Two strands of the year's news lay behind the choice. The first was Tesla, the electric-car manufacturer of which he is chief executive and product architect: its share price rose so far that he became the richest person in the world, and the company he leads gave the case for replacing the internal combustion engine a commercial rather than merely an environmental form. The second was SpaceX, of which he is chief executive and chief engineer, which through 2021 flew a series of missions including one that put a crew of private citizens into orbit without a professional astronaut aboard. It is worth understanding what the award is and is not, because candidates lose marks on it by treating it as an honour. Time has chosen a Person of the Year annually since 1927, when the franchise began under the title Man of the Year with Charles Lindbergh as the first choice; the title was changed to the gender-neutral Person of the Year in 1999. The magazine's stated test is influence — the person, group, idea or object that for better or for worse has done the most to shape the events of the year — and not merit, which is why the list has included figures the magazine plainly did not admire. The choices immediately around 2021 are worth carrying as a run, because an examiner setting this question in one year may set the neighbouring year next: 2018 went to the Guardians, a group of journalists; 2019 to Greta Thunberg; 2020 jointly to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris; 2021 to Elon Musk; and 2022 to the Spirit of Ukraine. Learning the run is more useful than learning the single year, both because it costs almost nothing extra and because two of the four options in this very question are answered by it. The answer to be marked is option (3).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Malala Yousafzai is not Time's Person of the Year for 2021. She is the Pakistani education campaigner who was shot by the Taliban in 2012 for her advocacy of schooling for girls, survived, and went on to share the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 with Kailash Satyarthi, becoming the youngest Nobel laureate. She appears here because she is exactly the kind of figure a candidate expects a magazine to honour — young, admired, associated with a moral cause — and the option therefore tests whether the candidate understands what Time's Person of the Year measures. It measures influence on the year's events, for better or for worse, not moral standing, which is why the list includes people the magazine was openly hostile to. A candidate who reasons about this award by asking who deserved recognition will be led wrong more often than right. The general lesson for awards questions is to learn what each award is for before learning who received it: the Nobel Peace Prize, the Ramon Magsaysay Award and Time's Person of the Year are three quite different instruments, and only the last of them is not an honour at all.  (b) Ratan Tata is one of India's best-known industrialists, having led Tata Sons as its chairman, but he was not Time's Person of the Year for 2021 and has not been chosen in any year. The option belongs to a familiar category of distractor in Indian examination papers: a well-regarded Indian name inserted into a question about an international award, on the calculation that a candidate who does not know the answer will prefer a name he recognises and is glad to see. The calculation works often enough to be worth the examiner's while, and the defence is to answer the question actually asked rather than to reward familiarity. It is also worth noting that Time runs several distinct franchises which candidates conflate — the Person of the Year, the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people, the Time 100 Next list and various best-of lists — and appearance on one of them is not selection as Person of the Year. Questions are set on the Person of the Year because it is a single name each year and therefore unambiguous.  (d) Kamala Harris is the most carefully chosen of the three wrong options, because she has in fact been Time's Person of the Year — but for 2020, not 2021, and jointly rather than alone. The magazine named Joe Biden and Kamala Harris together for 2020, the year of the American presidential election in which they were elected President and Vice-President. This question asks about 2021, and the choice for that year was Elon Musk. The construction is a good example of how a well-made current affairs distractor works: it is not a wrong answer but a right answer to a neighbouring question, so that a candidate who has stored the association between the name and the award without storing the year will take it. The corrective is the one that applies across the whole of this section — a current affairs fact is a fact about a date, and the date belongs in the memory with the fact. Learning the Person of the Year as a run of consecutive years, rather than as a single entry, makes this particular distractor harmless.

Concept: Time's Person of the Year is an annual editorial selection made by the magazine since 1927, when it began under the title Man of the Year, the first choice being the aviator Charles Lindbergh; the title was made gender-neutral in 1999. The stated criterion is influence rather than merit — the person, group, idea or object judged to have done the most to shape the events of the year, for better or for worse — and this is the single most important thing to know about it, because the criterion explains selections that make no sense if the award is read as an honour. The franchise has also chosen groups and abstractions rather than individuals on many occasions, which is why the run for the years around this question includes the Guardians in 2018 and the Spirit of Ukraine in 2022 alongside named individuals in the intervening years. The 2021 choice, announced on 13 December 2021, was Elon Musk, chief executive and product architect of Tesla and chief executive and chief engineer of SpaceX, in a year in which the rise of Tesla's share price made him the richest person in the world and SpaceX flew a crew of private citizens into orbit. The citation given by the editor-in-chief, Edward Felsenthal, praised him for creating solutions to an existential crisis, for embodying the possibilities and the perils of the age of tech titans, and for driving society's most daring and disruptive transformations — a formulation that carries the ambivalence the criterion of influence permits. Awards questions in general repay being organised by award rather than by year, with a short note on what each award is for, who confers it and how often, and then a run of recent recipients.

State PCS 2022 Q73 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q73 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer