ibps-so 2016 · Question 254 of 394

A recruitment cell drew up the candidates of one panel in a single row for the purpose of the veri cation of their documents. In that row Sohanlal stands fourteenth from the left end and ninth from the right end. If ve more candidates are made to join the same row at the right end of it, how many candidates would there be in the row altogether?

1. A27Correct
2. B22
3. C26
4. D28
5. E23 Directions (Q60–Q64) : Read the passage given below with care and answer the questions that follow it. One word has been printed in bold in order to help you to locate it while answering one of the questions. Certain questions turn upon what the author has stated in terms and others upon what may fairly be inferred from what he has stated; in every case your answer is to rest upon the passage alone and not upon any knowledge of the subject that you may bring to it from elsewhere. No gure is quoted with greater con dence, or understood with less, than the single number which is said to express the output of a nation in a single year. It is recited in legislatures and treated in argument as a plain fact of nature, ascertained as the height of a mountain is ascertained. It is no such thing: a construction, assembled out of surveys that reach a fraction of the population, tax returns led by those who le them, and estimates which stand in for whole trades no enumerator has ever visited. That such a construction is possible at all is a quiet triumph; that it should be handled as a reading taken from an instrument is a habit worth examining. Consider rst what the aggregate agrees to notice. Only what passes through a market is counted, because only what passes through a market carries a price, and without a price there is nothing to add up. Hence the standing joke of the discipline, that a man who marries his housekeeper reduces the national income at a stroke: the same work is done, but the wage has ceased to be paid and the work has therefore ceased to exist. It is not really a joke in a country where an immense quantity of labour, most of it done by women, is performed outside any wage bargain whatever. Consider next what the aggregate agrees to ignore. A forest felled and sold enters the accounts as income in the year of the felling, while the disappearance of the forest enters nowhere, the accounts keeping no register of the country's capital as a prudent rm keeps a register of its plant. Worse, expenditure incurred in repairing damage is added to output as freely as the expenditure which caused it: the cost of cleaning a river is added to output while the fouling of it is subtracted from nothing, so that a misfortune, provided it is expensive enough to remedy, will present itself in the arithmetic as prosperity. There is besides the di culty of separating what has grown in quantity from what has merely risen in price. The statistician must decide how much of the rise in the price of a machine represents a better machine, and what is to be done with goods that did not exist ve years ago. These are matters of judgement upon which honest men di er, and the judgement, once made, is buried so deep in the method that the reader of the nal gure never learns it was made. Nor is the number, once published, a xed thing. The rst estimate rests upon a small fraction of the information that will eventually be available; it is revised, and revised again, and a change of base year may shift the whole series by more than the growth it was quoted to demonstrate – policy having meanwhile been made upon the provisional gure. And the aggregate says nothing about who received the income: a country in which the whole increase accrued to a hundred families would report the growth of one in which it was shared by all. To recite these objections is not to conclude, as the more excitable critics do, that the estimate should be discarded and an index of well-being put in its place. That is a chimerical ambition: contentment cannot be added up, and a government obliged to act must have a number to act upon. The aggregate is not a measurement in the sense that the weight of a sack of grain is a measurement; it is an estimate built upon a convention, and it remains the most serviceable estimate we possess. The fault lies not in the arithmetic but in the credulity of those who use it, and the remedy is not to discard the estimate but to quote it with the di dence proper to an estimate, setting beside it the plainer gures – of schooling, of health, of the distribution of what is earned – which it was never designed to supply.