Passage
: Read the following passage and answer the four questions that follow.
The standard story of how scientific revolutions occur tells us that an established paradigm collapses under the weight of accumulated anomalies, and a new framework, more accurate and more elegant, replaces it. This story is reassuring because it makes the transition look rational; the old picture failed empirically, and the community of scientists, being empirical, switched. Yet historians of science have for some time pointed out a curious feature of major theoretical shifts. The crucial anomalies are very often known long before the paradigm is overthrown, and the eventual replacement is frequently no better at handling them, at least at first, than the theory it displaces. Galileo’s heliocentrism initially required ad hoc patches to explain motions that geocentric astronomy already explained reasonably well, and the early atomic theory could not predict valences with the precision of the contemporary chemistry of equivalents. If anomalies alone do not topple paradigms, what does?
One tempting answer is that paradigms fall when a more elegant framework arrives. Elegance, however, is not a property paradigms simply have or lack; it is something they acquire through the practice of those who use them. Newtonian mechanics was thought clumsy until the calculus of variations made it lean. Elegance, then, is partly a record of accumulated mathematical labour, and so cannot, without circularity, be the reason a new paradigm is preferred.
A more persuasive account locates the shift in the changing distribution of authority within scientific communities. Young researchers, looking for problems on which to make a reputation, drift toward the new framework because it offers more open questions and fewer entrenched experts. As they
secure positions and prizes, the institutional centre of gravity moves. The transition therefore looks empirical in retrospect, but is sustained at the time by something closer to a generational migration. This is not to say that evidence is irrelevant. It is to say that the community will tolerate evidence weighing against a young theory and refuse the same indulgence to an old one.
Such an account is uncomfortable, because it suggests that what is called scientific consensus is partly an artefact of professional life. Yet to call this a critique of science would be to misread it. The migration of attention to richer research problems is precisely what makes science productive. If young scientists clung to a paradigm only because it was well-confirmed, no new framework, however promising, could attract the labour needed to develop it. The scientific community’s apparent injustice toward incumbent theories is the price it pays for being able to move at all. A theory is overthrown not when it has been refuted but when it has stopped being interesting to those who still have careers to build.
Question
The author would most likely agree with which of the following?
Options
A paradigm’s longevity is best measured by the volume of new research problems it continues to generate, not by the volume of evidence supporting it.
The history of science shows that empirical refutation, properly understood, remains the central engine of theoretical change.
Scientific revolutions reveal a deep irrationality at the heart of the scientific enterprise, since they are driven by social rather than evidential factors.
The migration of younger scientists to new frameworks is unjust to established theories, even if it is necessary for scientific progress.
Passage 2: Read the following passage and answer the four questions that follow.
When economists describe a city as “efficient,” they usually mean that its labour and housing markets clear quickly: workers find jobs near where they live, firms find workers near where they invest, and rents settle at levels that reflect underlying productivity. By this measure, large Indian metropolises perform poorly. Commute times are long, formal housing is scarce, and a substantial share of workers live in settlements that planners refuse to recognise. The natural conclusion is that these cities are dysfunctional, and that a programme of clearance, formalisation, and improved transport will restore them to economic health.
This conclusion, however attractive to administrators, misreads what these settlements are doing. An informal settlement near an industrial corridor is not a failure of the labour market; it is a low-cost solution to a problem the formal market refuses to solve. The settlement offers proximity to work without the rents that proximity would command in a recognised neighbourhood. It allows a domestic worker, a small contractor, and a security guard to share infrastructure that none could afford alone. Far from being economically irrational, these arrangements are remarkably well-tuned to the constraint that the formal city, by withholding tenure and services, has itself imposed.
It is true that informality carries real costs. Residents face the constant possibility of eviction, cannot use their homes as collateral, and have weaker claims on schools and clinics. To point this out, however, is not to vindicate the standard prescription. The standard prescription assumes that the costs of informality are caused by informality itself, when in many cases they are caused by the refusal of the state to extend ordinary services to informal residents. A settlement does not lack a paved road because it is informal; it lacks one because the municipality has decided that paving it would amount to recognition. The defect, in other words, lies in the relationship between settlement and state, not in the settlement.
Critics may respond that this reasoning romanticises poverty, treating exposure to floods and fires as a clever adaptation. The objection has force, but it misses the analytical point. To say that an arrangement is well-tuned to its constraints is not to praise the constraints. It is to insist that policy take the arrangement seriously rather than treat it as rubble to be cleared. Programmes that begin by demolishing such settlements and rehousing residents at the city’s edge do not solve the underlying market failure; they recreate the original problem at greater distance, and in doing so impose costs on residents that the original arrangement had ingeniously avoided. The relevant question for policy is not how to dissolve informality but how to extend to it the recognitions that would relieve its avoidable costs without destroying the proximities it has won.
Q5. The author’s primary purpose in the passage is to:
argue that informal urban settlements are economically rational responses to constraints imposed by the formal city, and that policy should adjust to that fact rather than try to eliminate informality.
Detailed solution
Q4. Answer: A. The closing claim is that a theory is overthrown “not when it has been refuted but when it has stopped being interesting to those who still have careers to build.” Translating this conceptually: a paradigm’s longevity is best read as its capacity to generate new problems, not as the supply of supporting evidence. • Runner-up: D. Tempting because the passage calls the community’s behaviour an “apparent injustice” toward incumbent theories. But the author immediately reframes this as not really unjust and as the price of being able to move at all. D reads “apparent injustice” as actual injustice, confusing concession with endorsement.
• B. Directly contradicted by the passage.
• C. Descriptive-to-prescriptive shift: the passage describes a social mechanism but explicitly denies
it amounts to irrationality.
Passage 2: Informal Settlements and the Formal City