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UPSC CSAT Tough Reading Comprehension 20 — The Irreversibility Problem in Public Decisions

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Sample Questions from UPSC CSAT Tough Reading Comprehension 20 — The Irreversibility Problem in Public Decisions

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Q1. Which one of the following best expresses the central argument of the passage?

A. Irreversible public projects should normally be postponed because future information is more reliable than present estimates.

B. Public decisions under uncertainty should consider how acting and waiting alter future options, because both action and delay can create irreversible consequences.

C. Expected benefit-cost analysis is unsuitable for decisions involving environmental or technological uncertainty.

D. Governments should prefer temporary policies and pilot programmes to permanent policies whenever uncertainty exists.

Q2. What does the author primarily mean by 'option value' in the passage?

A. The economic return obtained from choosing among several competing public projects.

B. The value created by permanently committing resources before competitors can do so.

C. The value of retaining the ability to make or revise a decision after obtaining additional information.

D. The monetary value assigned to environmental resources that do not currently have market prices.

Q3. Which one of the following assumptions is most essential to the author's argument that waiting can sometimes possess option value?

A. Future information may become available that could materially change which decision is considered preferable.

B. The economic cost of postponing public projects is usually negligible.

C. Irreversible decisions generally produce greater social costs than reversible decisions.

D. Governments are better at interpreting future information than private individuals.

Q4. With reference to the passage, consider the following statements: 1. An irreversible decision should always require a higher expected economic return than a reversible decision. 2. Delaying a decision can itself eliminate future options. 3. Successful small-scale experimentation necessarily establishes that large-scale implementation will be successful. 4. Social and economic adaptation can make an initially reversible-looking decision increasingly difficult to reverse. Which of the statements given above are consistent with the passage?

A. 1 and 2 only

B. 2 and 4 only

C. 1, 2 and 4 only

D. 2, 3 and 4 only

Q5. Why does the author argue that 'keeping options open' is not a neutral act?

A. Because governments generally use delay as a political strategy to avoid responsibility.

B. Because postponement preserves all existing possibilities but imposes additional financial costs.

C. Because postponing one commitment may preserve certain possibilities while causing other opportunities to disappear or problems to become harder to reverse.

D. Because future generations are unlikely to value the options preserved by current policymakers.