08 Dec 2023 – Morning Shift – UGC NET Paper-1

Statement I: In Nalanda, apart from Buddhist canonical texts, the vedas were also taught.
Statement II: However, attempts were made to discourage the teaching of literature of the rival religions.

In the light of the above statements, choose the most appropriate answer from the options given below:

Statement I: India spends one of the lowest amounts per student for higher education in the world.
Statement II: The percentage expenditure on university and higher education in India was 0.77 percent in 1990-91 and it declined to 0.66 percent in 2004-2005.

In the light of the above statements, choose the most appropriate answer from the options given below:

Comprehension

Over the past 160 years, life expectancy in the industrialized world has increased at the steady rate of a quarter year every year. At first, the change was driven by the spread of things today often taken for granted: clean water, sewage and waste disposal, better nutrition, vaccines, and antibiotics. By the late 1970s, these innovations had reached the point of diminishing returns, yet at almost the same time, new technologies began to produce real gains in the fight against the most deadly remaining threats: cancer, heart disease, and strokes. Even counting the least development countries, the average person worldwide can expect to live to nearly 70 up from the mid 30s at the turn of the twentieth century.

Though, the future is certainly impossible to predict, many forward looking thinkers have begun to broach the possibility that at some point in the next twenty years a child will be born who will live to the now unimaginable age of one hundred forty; his of her children may, in turn look forward to a world in which there exists no "Natural" limit on the age to which one might expect to live. Barring random accident or deliberate homicide, men and women separated from us by only two generations might live indefinitely. In principle, all that is required is for technology to continue advancing faster than one ages.

Such optimism must, however, be tempered with an awareness of life's social and physical limitations. Today's developing technologies will no doubt be expensive and increasingly so at the upper ends of the age spectrum, further increasing the gap between rich and poor. As lifespan increases, previously rare maladies will loom even larger. Alzheimer's, a growing threat to today's elderly, was almost unknown before the 1950s, primarily because, statistically speaking most people died before symptoms developed.

The increase in life expectancy was initially due to the availability of:

(A) New technologies
(B) Clean water
(C) Vaccines
(D) Antibiotics
(E) Better nutrition

Choose the correct answer from the options given below:

(A) They will be expensive for older people
(B) They will give rise to rare maladies
(C) They will increase the gap between the rich and the poor
(D) They will be harmful

Choose the correct answer from the options given below:

Statement (I): Promising new technologies will not increase the life span of the people living in the least developed countries.
Statement (II): Promising new technologies to extend human lifespan will successfully overcome all social and physical limitations.

In the light of the above statements, choose the most appropriate answer from the options given below: