Live Updates
• CATKing has launched new chat bot.

• New video on Logs has been released.
13.2K
Learners
asked the doubt

Previous Year Questions
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for
each question.
The history of any major technological or industrial advance is inevitably shadowed by a less predictable history
of unintended consequences and secondary effects — what economists sometimes call “externalities.”
Sometimes those consequences are innocuous ones, or even beneficial. Gutenberg invents the printing press,
and literacy rates rise, which causes a significant part of the reading public to require spectacles for the first
time, which creates a surge of investment in lens-making across Europe, which leads to the invention of the
telescope and the microscope.
Oftentimes the secondary effects seem to belong to an entirely different sphere of society. When Willis Carrier
hit upon the idea of air-conditioning, the technology was primarily intended for industrial use: ensuring cool, dry
air for factories that required low-humidity environments. But…it touched off one of the largest migrations in the
history of the United States, enabling the rise of metropolitan areas like Phoenix and Las Vegas that barely
existed when Carrier first started tinkering with the idea in the early 1900s.
Sometimes the unintended consequence comes about when consumers use an invention in a surprising way.
Edison famously thought his phonograph, which he sometimes called “the talking machine,” would primarily be
used to take dictation….But then later innovators… discovered a much larger audience willing to pay for musical
recordings made on descendants of Edison’s original invention. In other cases, the original innovation comes
into the world disguised as a plaything…the way the animatronic dolls of the mid-1700s inspired Jacquard to
invent the first “programmable” loom and Charles Babbage to invent the first machine that fit the modern
definition of a computer, setting the stage for the revolution in programmable technology that would transform
the 21st century in countless ways.
We live under the gathering storm of modern history’s most momentous unintended consequence….carbonbased climate change. Imagine the vast sweep of inventors whose ideas started the Industrial Revolution, all
the entrepreneurs and scientists and hobbyists who had a hand in bringing it about. Line up a thousand of them
and ask them all what they had been hoping to do with their work. Not one would say that their intent had been
to deposit enough carbon in the atmosphere to create a greenhouse effect that trapped heat at the surface of
the planet. And yet here we are.
Ethyl (leaded fuel) and Freon belonged to the same general class of secondary effect: innovations whose
unintended consequences stem from some kind of waste by-product that they emit. But the potential health
threats of Ethyl (unleaded fuel) were visible in the 1920s, unlike, say, the long-term effects of atmospheric
carbon build up in the early days of the Industrial Revolution….
Indeed, it is reasonable to see CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) as a forerunner of the kind of threat we will most
likely face in the coming decades, as it becomes increasingly possible for individuals or small groups to create
new scientific advances — through chemistry or biotechnology or materials science — setting off unintended
consequences that reverberate on a global scale
The author lists all of the following examples as “externalities” of major technical advances EXCEPT:
Video Explanation

Which of the following best conveys the main point of the first paragraph?
Video Explanation

Carrier, Babbage, and Edison are mentioned in the passage to illustrate the author’s point that
Video Explanation

We can assume that the author would support all of the following views EXCEPT:
Video Explanation

Previous year papers
2024
2023
2022
2021
2020
2019
2018