Direction: You have two brief passages with 5 questions following each passage. Read the passages carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives.
PASSAGE
Two hundred years after Malthus predicted that population growth would overtake food production by a margin of 256 to 9, the simple fact is that food production had always been ahead of the population growth. Malthus’ doomsday prediction simply did not come true due to two major reasons: first, population did not grow geometrically and birth rates in all Western countries fell during the 20th Century, resulting in very slow population growth. Over the past quarter century, birth rates have been falling in the developing countries too. Second, modern agricultural practices and better irrigation have resulted in tremendous growth in food production in almost all parts of the globe, with the notable exception of sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore, at the global level, the Malthusian doomsday never befell on us. India’s population grew by about two and a half times in the past 45 years -from 361 million in 1951 to an estimated 916 million in 1995. But during the same period, India’s food-grain production grew by nearly four times from 51 million tonnes in 1951 to 191 million tonnes in 1995. As a result, the per capita food grain availability in India has gone up considerably since the independence. That is, the Malthusian prediction has not come true even in India.
SOME IMPORTANT WORDS
dooms day : the last day of the world
befell : something unpleasant happened to somebody