IIFT 2018 Question Paper

Read passage carefully. Answer the questions by selecting the most appropriate option (with reference to the passage).
PASSAGE 4

While majoring in computer science isn't a requirement to participate in the Second Machine Age, what skills do liberal arts graduates specifically possess to contribute to this brave new world? Another major oversight in the debate has been the failure to appreciate that a good liberal arts education teaches many skills that are not only valuable to the general world of business, but are in fact vital to innovating the next wave of breakthrough tech-driven products and services. Many defenses of the value of a liberal arts education have been launched, of course, with the emphasis being on the acquisition of fundamental thinking and communication skills, such as critical thinking, logical argumentation, and good communication skills. One aspect of liberal arts education that has been strangely neglected in the discussion is the fact that the humanities and social sciences are devoted to the study of human nature and the nature of our communities and larger societies. Students who pursue degrees in the liberal arts disciplines tend to be particularly motivated to investigate what makes us human: how we behave and why we behave as we do. They're driven to explore how our families and our public institutions-such as our schools and legal systems-operate, and could operate better, and how governments and economies work, or as is so often the case, are plagued by dysfunction. These
students learn a great deal from their particular courses of study and apply that knowledge to today's issues, the leading problems to be tackled, and various approaches for analyzing and addressing those problems.
The greatest opportunities for innovation in the emerging era are in applying evolving technological capabilities to finding better ways to solve human problems like social dysfunction and political corruption; finding ways to better educate children; helping people live healthier and happier lives by altering harmful behaviors; improving our working conditions; discovering better ways to tackle poverty; Improving healthcare and making it more affordable; making our governments more accountable, from the local level up to that of global affairs; and finding optimal ways to incorporate intelligent, nimble machines into our work lives so that we are empowered to do more of the work that we do best, and to let the machines do the rest. Workers with a solid liberal arts education have a strong foundation to build on in pursuing these goals. One of the most immediate needs in technology innovation is to invest
products and services with more human qualities. with more sensitivity to human needs and desires. Companies and entrepreneurs that want to succeed today and in the future must learn to consider in all aspects of their product and service creation how they can make use of the new technologies to make them more humane. Still, many other liberal arts disciplines also have much to provide the world of technological innovation. The study of psychology, for example, can help people build products that are more attuned to our emotions and ways of thinking. Experience in Anthropology can additionally help companies understand cultural and individual behavioural factors that should be considered in developing products and in marketing them. As technology allows for more machine intelligence and our lives become increasingly populated by the Internet of things and as the gathering of data about our lives and analysis of it allows for more discoveries about our behaviour, consideration of how new products and services can be crafted for the optimal enhancement of our lives and the nature of our communities, workplaces and governments will be of vital importance. Those products and services developed with the keeneSt sense of how they' can serve our human needs and complement our human talents will have a distinct competitive advantage. Much of the criticism of the liberal arts is based on the false assumption that liberal arts students lack rigor in comparison to those participating in the STEM disciplines and that they are 'soft' and unscientific whereas those who study STEM fields learn the scientific method. In fact the liberal arts teach many methods of rigorous inquiry and analysis, such as close observation and interviewing in ways that hard science adherents don't always appreciate. Many fields have long incorporated the scientific method and other types of data driven scientific inquiry and problem solving. Sociologists have developed sophisticated mathematical models of societal networks. Historians gather voluminous data on centuries-old household expenses, marriage and divorce rates, and the world trade, and use data to conduct statistical analyses, identifying trends and contributing factors to the phenomena they are studying. Linguists have developed high-tech models of the evolution of language, and they've made crucial contributions to the development of one of the technologies behind the rapid advance of automation- natural language processing, whereby computers are able to communicate with the, accuracy and personality of Siri and Alexa. It's also important to debunk the fallacy that liberal arts students who don't study these quantitative analytical methods have no 'hard' or relevant skills. This gets us back to the arguments about the fundamental ways of thinking, inquiring, problem solving and communicating that a liberal arts education teaches.

Read passage carefully. Answer the questions by selecting the most appropriate option (with reference to the passage).
PASSAGE 5

For policy makers to this day. GDP remains the definitive yardstick for economic performance, permitting them to assess the health and progress of a nation's economy and, by extension, people's lives. Yet GDP's dominance has brought criticism. It fails to capture changes to an economy's structure, such as the shifts to a service-led or technology-based economy. Some have protested that it fails to capture the unofficial or black market economy. Others have asserted that any purely economic indicator by itself may be inadequate to truly measure society's progress. It is therefore no surprise that over the last several decades, economists, • sociologists, and other academics have devised other metrics for tracking happiness, well-being, and social progress, some of which have garnered a substantial following. Implicit in these metrics is a challenge to GDP as the dominant measure of human progress-despite the fact that these measures sometimes themselves rely on GDP or some variance of GDP and come with limitations of their own. Even so, GDP remains a compelling measure of economic as well as social progress inasmuch as improvements in economic GDP translate into social progress. Policymakers have nevertheless become interested in these alternative measures, which, even if they do not displace GDP as the most prominent measure of economic growth, have value in complementing GDP in future assessments for economic and living standard progress. Furthermore, these proposed additions to GDP remind us that the endgame for public policy is progress and improved living standards rather than GDP growth for growth's sake. Nonetheless. these rankings reveal that consistently richer Countries (in terms of GDP) rank at the top of the indices and poorer ones at the bottom. For example, happiness indices reflect a demand that happiness be recognized as a criterion for government policy. First published in 2012, the World Happiness Report measures happiness by indexing GDP per capita alongside social support, life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and the absence of corruption. Of the 155 Countries collated in the 2017 World floppiness Report, the ten happiest countries, in descending order, are Norway. Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland. Finland, the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Sweden. The ten least happy countries, beginning with the least happy, are the Central African Republic, Burundi, Tanzania, Syria, Rwanda, Togo, Guinea, Liberia, South Sudan, and Yemen: While the United States is the largest country in GDP terms, it ranks fourteenth on the 2017 happiness index. A more traditional measure that goes beyond GDP alone is the United Nations' Human Development Index (HIM). First published in 1990, the HDI assesses longevity, education, and income across each nation's population, on the premise "that people and their capabilities should be the ultimate criteria for assessing the development of a country, not economic growth alone." The HDI reveals how two countries with the same level of gross national income (GNI)-that is, the total domestic output (GDP) plus foreign GDP generated by citizens abroad, minus domestic output created by foreigners-can end up with such different outcomes. In this way, it allows observers to compare the relative effectiveness of different policy choices and capital investments. In this index, Norway, Australia. and Switzerland rank at the top, with GNIs above USS40,000, and the Central African Republic, Niger, and Chad arc at the bottom of the index, all with GNIs of less than US$2,000 per capita. Some of these measures move beyond individuals and attempt a holistic assessment of the health of society. Since its founding in 2012, the Social Progress Imperative has offered a Social Progress Index that examines a range of social and environmental indicators beyond GDP, from access to electricity to religious tolerance; to measure three distinct dimensions of social progress: Basic Human Needs, Foundations of Wellbeing, and Opportunity. The 2017 Social Progress Index covers 133 countries and 94 percent of the world's population. The world as a whole would score 64.85 in Social Progress based on an average of all countries. On average, the top cluster of fourteen countries ranked as having "very high social progress"-including Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland among others-scores 94.92 on Basic Human Needs, Foundations of Wellbeing, and Opportunity. The cluster of seven countries described as having' very low social progress" include the Central African Republic, Afghanistan. Chad, Angola, Niger, Guinea, and Yemen. For this cluster the average dimension scores of Basic Human Needs, Foundations of Wellbeing, and Opportunity are 42.67, 45.42, and 27.74. What can we learn from these various indices? While noneconomic factors such as health, well-being, and quality of life matter to humanity, economic measures such as GDP generally correlate to success in the other areas, with a small amount of variation among those who are awarded the top spot. In a nutshell, economic growth underpins all else; a country needs economic growth to achieve happiness, well-being, and ultimately human progress. To be sure, GDP estimates provide a snapshot of GDP at a single point in time, but nothing more. A large GDP can indicate that a country is rich yet mask that its economy might be struggling and scarcely growing.

Create a word using all jumbled alphabets as provided in the table below and identify its appropriate meaning.

Choose the correct answer from the options provided below to indicate the most appropriate word to complete the pair.

Select the most appropriate pair of words from the given option to meaningfully complete sentence(s).