Given below are two statements one labeled as Assertion (A) and other labeled as Reason (R). Select correct answer from the options given below.
(A) Cotton is not a weight lossing pure raw material, b

Question

Given below are two statements one labeled as Assertion (A) and other labeled as Reason (R). Select correct answer from the options given below.
(A) Cotton is not a weight lossing pure raw material, besides is light in weight and durable.
(R) The localization of the cotton textile is found either in cotton producing region or near market.

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Correct — option (2), 'Both (A) and (R) are true but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A)'. An assertion-reason item asks two questions in sequence, and both have to be settled before any option can be chosen: is each statement true on its own, and if both are, does the reason actually explain the assertion. Take the truth of (A) first. In the classification of raw materials used in industrial location theory, a pure raw material is one that passes its entire weight into the finished product, so that manufacture involves no loss of weight; a gross or weight-losing raw material is one that does not. Cotton is the textbook example of the first kind, because the lint that enters a mill comes out almost entirely as yarn and cloth. That is what the printed assertion says in its awkward way — cotton is a pure raw material and is not weight-losing — and it adds two further properties, lightness and durability, both of which are true and both of which have locational consequences, since a light, non-perishable material is cheap to move and can be stored and carried a long way without spoiling. (A) is true. Now (R). The cotton textile industry is in fact found in both kinds of place: mills stand in the cotton-growing tracts and mills stand at the great market and port centres. As a description of where the industry has localised, (R) is accurate, so (R) is true as well. That disposes of options (3) and (4) and leaves the real question, which is the direction of explanation. (A) is a statement about the physical properties of a fibre. (R) is a statement about where factories are found. A property of a material can explain a pattern of location; a pattern of location cannot explain a property of a material. Precisely because cotton is pure, weight-retaining, light and durable, transport cost does not pin the industry to the cotton field, and the industry is left free to settle at the source or at the market as other advantages dictate — which is the freedom (R) records. In other words (A) explains (R), and not the other way about. Both statements are true and (R) is not the correct explanation of (A), so option (2).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This is the option that collects most of the marks lost on assertion-reason items, because both statements really are true and both really are about the cotton textile industry, and a candidate who has verified their truth feels the work is done. Subject matter in common is not explanation. The test that separates option (1) from option (2) takes a few seconds: put the word 'because' between the two statements in the order the paper prints them and read the sentence aloud. 'Cotton is not a weight-losing pure raw material because the cotton textile industry is localised either in cotton-producing regions or near the market' is incoherent — where mills happen to stand can have no bearing whatever on how a fibre behaves during spinning. Read in the other direction the sentence is sound, and that is the signature of an item whose causal arrow points from the assertion to the reason. Whenever it does, the answer is option (2).  (c) This option requires (R) to be false, and it is not. The cotton textile industry genuinely does show both patterns of localisation: in India there are mills in the cotton-growing tracts of Gujarat and Maharashtra and there are mills at the large port and market centres, where capital, labour, power and a ready market outweighed proximity to the fields. A candidate reaches for this option in one of two ways. Either he has decided that an industry which is free to locate anywhere must have no pattern at all, when in fact 'either at the source or at the market' is itself the pattern that freedom produces. Or he has treated (R) as an explanation, found that it fails as one, and marked it false — which confuses the second question the item asks with the first. A reason can be perfectly true and still be the wrong reason, and that possibility is what option (2) exists for.  (d) This option requires (A) to be false, which would mean that cotton is a weight-losing or impure raw material. It is not: the lint delivered to a spinning mill emerges almost entirely as yarn and cloth. The candidate who chooses it is usually thinking of a real weight loss but locating it at the wrong stage. Cotton as picked is seed cotton, and ginning separates the lint from the seed, which removes a large fraction of the weight — and that is exactly why ginning is carried on in the growing tract, close to the fields, while spinning and weaving are not. Confusing the ginning stage with the textile stage is the standard route into this option. The other route is generalising from a genuinely weight-losing raw material such as sugarcane, which loses the bulk of its weight in milling and begins to lose sucrose within hours of cutting, and assuming every agricultural raw material behaves the same way.

Concept: The framework behind this question is the analysis of raw materials by their behaviour in manufacture, which is the core of Alfred Weber's least-cost theory of industrial location. Raw materials are first divided into ubiquities, available almost everywhere, such as water or common clay, and localised materials, found only at particular places. Localised materials are then divided into pure, which give their whole weight to the product, and gross or weight-losing, which do not. The measure that follows is the material index, the ratio of the weight of localised raw materials used to the weight of the finished product. Where that index is well above one, transport cost is minimised by manufacturing at the raw material rather than hauling waste to the market, and the industry is drawn to the source — sugar, which recovers only about a tenth of the cane's weight as sugar, and the smelting industries built on bulky ores are the standard cases. Where the index is at or below one there is nothing to save by staying at the source, and the industry is free to move towards the market or towards any other advantage. Cotton textiles sit in this second group: the material index is close to unity, so transport cost is much the same wherever the mill is placed along the route, and the location is decided instead by capital, labour, power, market access, and in the older Indian mills by a humid climate that reduced thread breakage. An industry as loosely tied as this is described as footloose.

State PCS 2023 Q25 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q25 — Geography PYQ with Answer