Science, Technology & Environment Previous Year Questions (PYQs) for XAT: 11+ Solved Questions with Step-by-Step Solutions

Common Description:

Later, I realized that reviewing the history of nuclear physics served another purpose as well: It gave the lie to the naive belief that the physicists could have come together when nuclear fission was discovered(in Nazi Germany!) and agreed to keep the discovery a secret, thereby sparing humankind the nuclear burden. No. Given the development of nuclear physics up to 1938, development that physicists throughout the world pursued in all innocence of any intention of finding the engine of a new weapon of mass destruction—only one of them, the remarkable Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, took that possibility seriously—the discovery of nuclear fission was inevitable. To stop it, you would have had to stop physics. If German scientists hadn’t made the discovery when they did, British, French, American, Russian, Italian, or Danish scientists would have done so, almost certainly within days or weeks. They were all working at the same cutting edge, trying to understand the strange results of a simple experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons. Here was no Faustian bargain, as movie directors and other naifs still find it intellectually challenging to imagine. Here was no evil machinery that the noble scientists might have hidden from the politicians and the generals. To the contrary, here was a new insight into how the world works, an energetic reaction, older than the earth, that science had finally devised the instruments and arrangements to coax forth. “Make it seem inevitable,” Louis Pasteur used to advise his students when they prepared to write up their discoveries. But it was. To wish that it might have been ignored or suppressed is barbarous. “Knowledge,” Niels Bohr once noted, “is itself the basis for civilization.” You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other. Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn’t filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, not always welcome. The earth revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth. “It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”

...Bohr proposed once that the goal of science is not universal truth. Rather, he argued, the modest but relentless goal of science is “the gradual removal of prejudices.” The discovery that the earth revolves around the sun has gradually removed the prejudice that the earth is the center of the universe. The discovery of microbes is gradually removing the prejudice that disease is a punishment from God. The discovery of evolution is gradually removing the prejudice that Homo sapiens is a separate and special creation.

Based on the passage, which of the following statements is DEFINITELY NOT true?

Common Description: Corporations continue to ignore the threat of global warming, probably because global warming is a hyper-object, very di cult to touch and feel. Because hyper-objects have much wider time-space boundaries than human beings, we tend to consider hyper-objects as given and non-existent. Therefore, it is very di cult to deal with hyper-objects as their common understanding is lacking. Some of us continue to believe that global warming is blown out of proportion-it is not a serious threat. Even those who understood hyper-objects have yet to gure out right response to them.
The lack of understanding and response from corporations to “climate change” is evident from the fact that most of businesses have remained largely human-centric. Some businesses have adopted green practices-voluntarily, or involuntary. These efforts attempt to reduce emissions through better energy e ciency. Though laudable, the efforts have failed to make any signi cant dent at the global level; the planet continues to get warmer. Moreover, most of the efforts are still in the sphere of “business as usual” and “what is good for us”.
Business as usual, the current model of economic production and distribution is deeply awed as it is based mainly on the capitalistic ethos of free-market legitimized through private property, competition, and unlimited consumption. The word “free” has come to mean that there are no constraints on individuals, and the word market has come to mean that buying and selling are the primary mechanisms, and everything is a transaction.
Private property gives individuals/nations a chance to create legal rights to own more and more, subject to very little constraints. It is evident in income inequalities witnessed across the world. The very notion of ownership is control-oriented and human-centric that promotes unlimited extraction from environment, hyper-nationalism, and hyper-individualism. The extraction and exploitation of the environment has served our economic interests, and led to the growth and survival of businesses. However, it has also led to the destruction of environment.
Global warming is the response of nature to human actions driven by businesses operating on the principles of surplus, predictability, control, hyper-rationality, linearity, and quanti cation. In other words, “business as usual” has yet to dance to the rhythm of nature. Which of the following statement(s) is NOT in consonance with the author’s views, as expressed in the passage?
1. Patents should be respected.
2. Trading of shares on the free stock markets should be promoted.
3. Building a beautiful resort on a hilltop.

Common Description: Corporations continue to ignore the threat of global warming, probably because global warming is a hyper-object, very di cult to touch and feel. Because hyper-objects have much wider time-space boundaries than human beings, we tend to consider hyper-objects as given and non-existent. Therefore, it is very di cult to deal with hyper-objects as their common understanding is lacking. Some of us continue to believe that global warming is blown out of proportion-it is not a serious threat. Even those who understood hyper-objects have yet to gure out right response to them.
The lack of understanding and response from corporations to “climate change” is evident from the fact that most of businesses have remained largely human-centric. Some businesses have adopted green practices-voluntarily, or involuntary. These efforts attempt to reduce emissions through better energy e ciency. Though laudable, the efforts have failed to make any signi cant dent at the global level; the planet continues to get warmer. Moreover, most of the efforts are still in the sphere of “business as usual” and “what is good for us”.
Business as usual, the current model of economic production and distribution is deeply awed as it is based mainly on the capitalistic ethos of free-market legitimized through private property, competition, and unlimited consumption. The word “free” has come to mean that there are no constraints on individuals, and the word market has come to mean that buying and selling are the primary mechanisms, and everything is a transaction.
Private property gives individuals/nations a chance to create legal rights to own more and more, subject to very little constraints. It is evident in income inequalities witnessed across the world. The very notion of ownership is control-oriented and human-centric that promotes unlimited extraction from environment, hyper-nationalism, and hyper-individualism. The extraction and exploitation of the environment has served our economic interests, and led to the growth and survival of businesses. However, it has also led to the destruction of environment.
Global warming is the response of nature to human actions driven by businesses operating on the principles of surplus, predictability, control, hyper-rationality, linearity, and quanti cation. In other words, “business as usual” has yet to dance to the rhythm of nature. Based on the passage, which of the following is NOT an example of human-centric statement?

Common Description: If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity.
Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity.
This is the principle of herd immunity, and it is through herd immunity that mass vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination.
Any given vaccine can fail to produce immunity in an individual, and some vaccines, like the in uenza vaccine, are less effective than others. But when enough people are vaccinated with even a relatively ineffective vaccine, viruses have trouble moving from host to host and cease to spread, sparing both the unvaccinated and those in whom vaccination has not produced immunity. This is why the chances of contracting measles can be higher for a vaccinated person living in a largely unvaccinated community than they are for an unvaccinated person living in a largely vaccinated community.
The unvaccinated person is protected by the bodies around her, bodies through which disease is not circulating.
But a vaccinated person surrounded by bodies that host disease is left vulnerable to vaccine failure or fading immunity. We are protected not so much by our own skin, but by what is beyond it. The boundaries between our bodies begin to dissolve here. Donations of blood and organs move between us, exiting one body and entering another, and so too with immunity, which is a common trust as much as it is a private account. Those of us who draw on collective immunity owe our health to our neighbors. Based on the last paragraph of the passage, which of the following would the author BEST agree with?

Common Description: It is harder and harder to make sense of life. Everything is changing, all the time, at a faster and faster pace. Our civilization is struggling to keep up with exponential technology and disruptive change. Our age-old institutions, politics, economics, ethics, religion and laws, even our environment, are so fundamentally challenged, that we risk collapse. Our stories have gotten so divorced from reality, so divisive, so in exible and so inept to adapt to and explain our present, let alone guide us towards a better future, that we often feel like helpless passengers on a Titanic spaceship Earth. No wonder Aristotle observed that “When the storytelling goes bad in a society, the result is decadence.” But why is this the case? And, perhaps more importantly, how is it that bad storytelling can keep, if not bring, a whole society down? Is that not simply overstating the power of story? Literary theorist Kenneth Burke famously noted: “Stories are equipment for human living. We need storytelling in order to make certain sense out of life.” If that is true then our equipment for living has gone obsolete. And unless we upgrade it we are going to go obsolete too.
It was this process that Fred Polak had in mind in 1961 while observing: Any student of the rise and fall of cultures cannot fail to be impressed by the role played in this historical succession by the image of the future.
The rise and fall of images precede or accompany the rise and fall of cultures. As long as a society’s image is positive and ourishing, the ower of culture is in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture does not long survive.
That is why we desperately need a new story. A story that will not only help us make sense of the world today but also unite us as a species of human beings. A story that will motivate us to stop bickering and resolve our common problems. A story that will inspire us to achieve our common goals and guide us towards a better future for all sentient beings on our planet.
We have to rewrite the human story. Because the old stories that brought us thus far are no longer useful.
They’ve lost their vision and grandeur. They’ve become petty and short-sighted. They’re stuck in a past that never was at the expense of a future that can be. They divide us and keep us bickering while our civilization is facing unprecedented diversity and depth of existential challenges. Those stories are not simply our history.
They are now our chains. And unless we break them, they will be our death sentence.
So, it is worth exploring if or how new stories, good stories can bring us up. The human story that brought us into the 21st century was written and rewritten several times. The latest major update was perhaps during the industrial revolution. It is time to rewrite it again. We need a new story. A brave story. An unreasonable story. A story that can inspire, unite and motivate us to break free from the past and create the best possible future. Read the following statements:
1. A story without connections and coherence.
2. A story that talks about recreating the past glory.
3. A story may not be factually true.
4. A story that is meaningful and compelling for humanity
Which of the above statements can be ASSOCIATED with the meaning of “unreasonable story”, as used in the passage?