IIFT 2017 Question Paper

Read the following passages carefully and identify most appropriate answer to the questions given at the end of each passage.

Groupon is one of the fastest-growing companies of all time. Its name comes from "group coupons," an ingenious idea that has spawned an entire industry of social commerce imitators. However, it didn't start out successful. When customers took Groupon up on its first deal, a whopping twenty people bought two-for-one pizza in a restaurant on the first floor of the company's Chicago offices-hardly a world-changing event. ln fact, Groupon wasn't originally meant to be about commerce at all. The founder, Andrew Mason, intended his company to become a "collective activism platform" called The Point. Its goal was to bring people together to solve problems they couldn't solve on their own, such as fund-raising for a cause or boycotting a certain retailer. The Point's early results were disappointing, however, and at the end of 2008 the founders decided to try something new. Although they still had grand ambitions, they were determined to keep the new product simple. They built a minimum viable product. Does this sound like a billion-dollar company to you? Mason tells the story: “We took a Word Press Blog and we skinned it to say Groupon and then every day we would do a new post. It was totally ghetto. We would sell T-shirts on the first version of Groupon. We'd say in the write-up, ”This T-shirt will come in the colour red, size large. If you want a different colour or size, e-mail that to us.” We didn't have a form to add that stuff. lt was just so cobbled together. It was enough to prove the concept and show that it was something that people really liked: The actual coupon generation that we were doing was all File Maker. We would run a script that would e-mail the coupon PDF to people. It got to the point where we'd sell 500 sushi coupons in a day, and we'd send 500 PDFs to people with Apple Mail at the same time. Really until July of the first year it was just a scrambling to grab the tiger by the tail. It was trying to catch up and reasonably piece together a product. "Handmade PDFs, a pizza coupon, and simple blog were enough to launch Groupon into-breaking success; it is on pace to become the fastest company in history to achieve $1 billion in sales. It is revolutionizing the way local businesses find new custmors, offering special deals to consumers in more than 375 cities worldwide. A minimum viable product (MVP) helps enterpremuers start the process of learning as quickly as possible. "It is not necessarily the smallest product imaginable, though; it is simply the fastest way to get through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop with the minimum amount of effort. Contrary to traditional product development, which usually involves a long, thoughtful incubation period and strives for product perfection, the goal of the MVP is to begin the process of learning, not end it, Unlike a prototype or concept test, an MVP is designed not just to answer product design or technical questions. Its goal is to test fundamental business hypotheses.

Early adopters use their imagination to fill in what a product is missing. They prefer that state of affairs, because what they care about above all is being the first one to use or adopt a new product or technology. In consumer products, it's often the thrill of being the first one on the block to show off a new basketball shoe, music player, or cool phone. In enterprise products, it's often about gaining a competitive advantage by taking a risk with something new that competitors don't have yet. Early adopters are suspicious of something that is too polished if it's ready for everyone to adopt, how much advantage cart one get by being early? As a result, additional features or polish beyond what early adopters demand is a form of wasted resources and time. This is a hard truth for many entrepreneurs to accept. After all, the vision entrepreneurs keep in their beads is of a high-quality mainstream product that will change the world, not one used by a small niche of people who are willing to give it a shot before it's ready. That world-changing product is polished, slick, and ready for prime time. It wins awards at trade shows and, most of all, is something you can proudly show Mom and Dad: An early, buggy, incomplete product feels like an unacceptable compromise. How many of us were raised with the expectation that we would put our best work forward? As one manager put it to me recently, "I know for me, the MVP feels a little dangerous in a good way-since I have always been such a perfectionist." Minimum viable products range in complexity from extremely simple smoke tests (little more than an advertisement) to actual early prototypes complete with problems and missing features. Deciding exactly how complex an MVP needs to be cannot be done using formulas. It requires judgment. Luckily, this judgment is not difficult to develop: most entrepreneurs and product development people dramatically over estimate how many features are needed in an MVP. When in doubt simplify. For example, consider a service sold with a one-month free trial. Before a customer can use the service, he or she has to sign up for the trial. One obvious assumption, then, of the business model is that customers will sign up for a free trial once they have a certain amount of information about the service. A critical question to consider is whether customers will in fact signup for the free trial given a certain number of promised features (the value hypothesis). Somewhere in the business model, probably buried in a single cell in a spreadsheet, it specifies the "percentage of customers whose the free trial offer who then sign up." Maybe in our projections we say that this number should be 10 percent. lf you think about it, this is a leap-of-faith question. It really should be represented in giant letters in a bold red font: WE ASSUME 10 PERCENT OF CUSTOMERS WILL SIGN UP.

Most entrepreneurs approach a question like this by building the product and then checking to see how customers react to it. I consider this to be exactly backward because it can lead to a lot of waste. First,if it turns out that we're building something nobody wants, the whole exercise will be an avoidable expense of time and money. If customers won't sign up for the free trial, they'll never get to experience the amazing features that await them. Even if they do sign up, there are many other opportunities for waste. For example, how many features do we really need to include to appeal to early adopters? Every extra feature is a form of waste, and if we delay the test for these extra features, it comes with a tremendous potential cost in terms of learning and cycle time. The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.

Read the following passages carefully and identify most appropriate answer to the questions given at the end of each passage:

I wear a variety of professional hats- university professor, literacy consultant to districts, author of several books related to comprehension.To keep myself honest (and humble); l spend a lot of time in classrooms watching kids and teachers at work. During the past decade, I've observed a transformation in the teaching of reading from an approved:h that measured readers' successful understanding of the text through lengthy packets of comprehension questions to one that requires students to think about their thinking, activating their "good reader" strategies. Close reading is a deep analysis of how a literary text works; it is both a· reading process and something you include in a literary analysis paper, though in a refined form. Fiction writers and poets build texts out of many central components, including subject, form, and specific word choices. Essentially, close reading means reading to uncover layers of meaning that lead to deep comprehension. "Close, analytic reading stresses engaging with a text of sufficient complexity directly and examining meaning thoroughly and methodically, encouraging students to read and reread deliberately. Directing student attention on the text itself empowers students to understand the central ideas and key supporting details. It also enables students to reflect on the meanings of individual words and sentences; the order in which sentences unfold; and the development of ideas over the course of the text, which ultimately leads students to arrive at an understanding of the text as a whole." Reread the definition of close reading closely-to extract .key concepts. You might identify these ideas: examining meaning thoroughly and analytically; directing attention to the text, central ideas, and supporting details; reflecting on meanings of individual words and sentences; and developing ideas over the course of the text. Notice that reader reflection is still integral to the process. But close reading goes beyond that: The best thinkers do monitor and assess their thinking, but in the context of processing the thinking of others (Paul & Elder, 2008).

When you close read, you observe facts and details about the text. You may focus on a particular passage, or on the text as a whole. Your aim may be notice all striking features of the text, including rhetorical features, structural elements and cultural references; or, your aim may be to notice only selected features of the text- for instance, oppositions and correspondences, or particular historical references. Either way, making these observations constitutes the first step in the process of close reading. The second step is interpreting your observations. What we're basically talking about here is inductive reasoning: moving from the observation of particular facts and details to a conclusion, or interpretation, based on those observations. And, as with inductive reasoning, close reading requires the careful gathering of data (your observations) and careful thinking about what these data add up to. The literary analysis involves examining these components, which still allows us to find in small parts of the text clues to help us understand the whole. For example, if an author writes a novel in the form of a personal journal about a character's daily life, but that journal reads like a series of lab reports, what do we learn about that character? What is the effect of picking a word like "tome" instead of ''book"? In effect, you are putting the author's choices under a microscope. The process of close reading should produce a lot of questions. It is when you begin to answer these questions that you are ready to participate thoughtfully in class discussion or write a literary analysis paper that makes the most of your close reading work. Close reading sometimes feels like over-analysing, but don worry. Close reading is a process of finding as much information as you can in order to form as many questions as you can. When it is time to write your paper and formalize your close reading, you'll sort through your work to figure out what is most convincing and helpful to the argument you hope to make and, conversely, what seems like a stretch. It's our responsibility as educators to build students' capacity for independently comprehending a text through close reading. Teaching is about the transfer. The goal is for students is to take what they learn from the study of one text and apply it to the next text they read: How can we ensure that students both reap the requisite knowledge from each text they read and acquire skills to pursue the meaning of other texts independently? I suggest we coach students to ask themselves four basic questions as they reflect on a specific portion of any text, even the shortest: What is the author telling me here? Are there any hard or important words? What does the author want me to understand? How does the author play with language to add to meaning? If students take time to ask themselves these questions while reading and become skilful at answering them, there'll be less need for the teacher to doll the asking. For this to happen, we must develop students' capacity to observe and analyse. First things first: See whether students have noticed the details of a passage and can recount those details in their own words. Note that the challenge here isn't to be brief (as in a summary); it's to be accurate, precise, and clear.

The recent focus on finding evidence in a text has sent students (even in primary grades) scurrying back to their books to retrieve a quote that validates their opinion. But to paraphrase what that quote means in a student's own language, rather than the author's, is more difficult than you might think. Try it with any paragraph. Expressing the same meaning with different words often requires going back to that text a few times to get the details just right. Paraphrasing is pretty low on Bloom's continuum of lower- to higher-order thinking, yet many students stumble even b: here. This is the first stop along the journey to close reading. If students can't paraphrase the basic content of a passage, how can they dig for its deeper meaning? The second basic question about hard or important words encourages students to zoom in on precise meaning. When students are satisfied that they have a basic grasp of what the author is telling them, they're ready to move on to analysing the fine points of content. If students begin their analysis by asking themselves the third question- What does the author want me to understand in this passage?-they'II be on their way to malcing appropriate inferences determining what the author is trying to show without stating it directly.

We can also teach students to read carefully with the eye of a writer, which means helping them analyse craft. How a text is written is as important as the content itself in getting the author's· message across. Just as a movie director focuses the camera on a particular detail to get you to view the scene the way he or she wants you to, authors play with words to get you to see a text their way. Introducing students to some of the tricks authors use opens students' minds to an entirely new realm in close reading.

Read the following passages carefully and identify most appropriate answer to the questions given at the end of each passage.

As someone' said, this crisis was too valuable to waste. I, for one, learnt many lessons on crisis management and leadership. By far the most important lesson I learnt is that the primary focus of a central bank during a crisis has to be on restoring confidence in the markets, and what this requires is swift, bold and decisive action. This is not as obvious'as it sounds because central banks are typically given to agonizing over every move they make out of anxiety that failure of their actions to deliver the intended impact will hurt their creditability and their policy effectiveness down the line. There is a lot to be said for such deliberative action in normal times: In crisis times though, it is important for them to take more chances without being too mindful of whether all of their actions are going to be fully effective or even mildly successful. After all, crisis management is a percentage game, and you do what you think has the best chance of reversing the momentum. Often, it is a fact of the action rather than the precise nature of the action that bolsters confidence. Take the Reserve Bank's measure I wrote about earlier of instituting exclusive lines of credit for augmenting the liquidity of NBFCs and mutual funds (MFs) which came under redemption pressure. It is simply unthinkable that the Reserve Bank would have done anything like this in normal times. In the event of a liquidity constraint in normal times, the standard response of the Reserve Bank would be to ease liquidity in the overall system an_d leave it to the banks to determine how to use that additional liquidity.

But here, we were targeting monetary policy at a particular class of financial institutions-the MFs &NBFCs-a; decidedly unconventional action. This departure from standard protocol pushed some of our senior staff beyond their comfort zones. Their reservations ranged from: 'this is not bowing monetary policy is done' to 'this will make the Reserve Bank vulnerable to pressures to bail out other sectors'. After hearing them out, I made the call to go ahead: Market participants applauded the new facility and saw it as the Reserve Bank's willingness to embrace unorthodox measures to address Specific areas of pressure in the system. In the event, these facilities were not significantly tapped: In normal times, that would have been seen as a failure of policy. From the crisis perspective though, it was a success in as much as the very existence of the central bank backstop restored confidence in the NBFCs and MFs and smoothed pressures in the financial system. Similarly, the cut in the repo rate of one full percentage point that I effected in October 2008 was a non-standard action from the perspective of a central bank used to cutting the interest rate by a maximum of half a percentage point (50 basis points in the jargon) when it wanted to signal strong action. Of course, we deliberated the advisability of going into uncharted waters and how it might set expectations. For the future. For example, in the future, the market may discount a 50 basis-point cut as too tame. But considering the uncertain and unpredictable global environment and the imperative to improve the flow of credit
in a stressed situation, I bit the bullet again and decided on a full percentage-point cut.

Managing the tension between short-term payoffs and longer-term consequences is a constant struggle in all central bank policy choices as indeed it is in all public policy decisions. This balance between horizons shifts in crisis times, as dousing the fires becomes an overriding priority even if some of the actions taken to do that may have·some longer-term costs. For example, in 2008, we saw a massive infusion of liquidity as the best bet for preserving the financial stability of our markets. Indeed, d in uncharted waters, erring on the side of caution meant providing the system with more liquidity than considered adequate. This strategy was effective in the short-term, but with hindsight, we know that excess liquidity may have reinforced inflation pressures down the line. But remember, we were making a judgement call in real time. Analysts who are criticising us are doing so with the benefit of hindsight. Another lesson we learnt is that even in a global crisis, central banks have to adapt their responses to domestic conditions. I am saying this because of all through the crisis months. Whenever another central bank, especially an advanced economy central bank, announced any measure, there was an immediate pressure that the Reserve Bank too should institute a similar measure. Such straightforward copying of measures of other central banks without first examining their appropriateness for the domestic situation can often do more harm than good: Let me illustrate. During th depth of the crisis, fearing a run on their banks, the UK authorities bad extended deposit insurance across board to all deposits in the UK banking system. Immediately, there were commentators asking that the Reserve Bank too must embrace such an all-out measure. If we had actually done that, the results would have been counterproductive if not outright harmful. First, the available premium would not have been able to support such a blanket insurance, and the markets were aware of that.

If we had glossed over that and announced a blanket cover anyway, that action would have clearly lacked credibility. Besides, any such move would be at odds with what we had been asserting that our banks and our financial systems were safe and sound: The inconsistency between our walk and talk would have confused the markets; instead of reassuring them, any blanket insurance of the UK type·would have scared the public and sown seeds of doubt about the safety of their bank deposits, potentially triggering a run on some vulnerable banks. Finally, an important lesson from the crisis relates to the imperative of the government and the regulators speaking and acting in unison. It is possible to argue that public disclosure of differences within closed doors of policymaking could actually be helpful in enhancing public understanding on how policy might evolve in the future. For example, a 6-6 vote conveys a different message from a 12-0 vote. During crisis times, though, sending mixed signals to fragile markets can do huge damage. On the other hand, the demonstration of unity of purpose would reassure markets and yield great synergies. The experience of the crisis from around the world and our own experience too showed that coordination could be managed without compromising regulatory autonomy. Merely synchronizing policy announcements for exploiting the synergistic impact need not necessarily imply that regulators were being forced into actions they did not own.