ibps-so 2016 · Question 64 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 (Q65–Q69) : Read the passage given below with care and answer the questions that follow it. Certain words have been printed in bold in order to help you to locate them while answering some of the questions. Your answers are to rest upon the passage alone. One of the more awkward ndings of recent economic history is that the proportion of women reported as working for pay in India has fallen over a period in which incomes rose, families grew smaller and girls stayed at school very much longer than their mothers had done. Every one of those changes was expected to push the gure upward. That it moved the other way has produced a literature of explanation, the careless part of which begins by assuming that women have simply chosen to remain at home. Before any explanation is attempted, something must be said about the counting. The categories of a labour force survey were framed for an economy of wages and hours, and they sit badly upon work that is neither waged nor timed. A woman who gives three hours of the morning to the family plot and describes herself to the enumerator as engaged in housework is recorded as outside the labour force altogether; so is the woman who sorts the grain, tends the two bu aloes upon whose milk the household depends, and stitches for neighbours who pay her in kind. Re-surveys which ask about activities rather than about status recover a substantial part of this labour and report participation many points higher. Some of the celebrated decline is therefore a decline in what the questionnaire can see. Some of it, however, is real, and the reasons are not the ones usually o ered. As a household's income rises, its women commonly withdraw rst from the most arduous and worst paid occupations, from the wage gangs at harvest and from the brick kiln; and withdrawal from paid manual labour has long been read in the village as a mark of arrival. A rate that falls for this reason is not a symptom of distress at all, which is precisely why it is so often misread. The larger part of the explanation, though, lies not with the women but with the jobs. Growth of the kind India has had did not create work of the kind that would have drawn them in. The jobs that growth actually created were in construction and in transport, trades which hire men almost exclusively; the factories which elsewhere absorbed the daughters of cultivators by the million were, in India, comparatively few, and much of the expansion of services demanded a degree, a commute and hours no woman with an infant could contemplate. A girl who has nished school will not go to the kiln her mother went to, and no o ce has opened within reach of her; so she waits, and the survey records her as outside the labour force. Two obstacles compound this. The rst is the burden of unpaid care, which is not shared: the day of a working woman is lengthened at both ends by fuel, water, cooking and the children, and no wage compensates for a second working day. The second is the journey. Safety upon a bus at nine in the evening is not a sentimental question but an economic one, and where the last stage of it is unlit, employment three miles away is not employment at all. The cost of all this is not borne by women alone. A country which employs so small a share of the talent it has educated pays for the schooling twice over and collects the return once. Within the household the di erence is sharper still, for an income of her own alters what a woman may decide about her daughter's schooling, her own health and the spending of the family's money. A participation rate is a mirror held up to institutions and not to preferences: it answers to the hours an employer will accept, to the creche that exists or does not exist,to the bus that runs after dark and to the law about who may work at night. Change those, and the gure will move without a single word of exhortation being addressed to anybody.