UPSC Previous Year Question Paper 2026-CISF-AC-EXCE-LDCE-eassy Precis Writing and Comprehension Free PDF Download 

Q1. निम्नलिखित विषयों में से किसी एक पर लगभग 500 शब्दों में निबंध लिखिए : Write an essay in about 500 words on any one of the following topics: 40

(a) उम्र का बढ़ाव एक प्रक्रिया है, कुछ खोना नहीं Aging is a process, not loss

(b) खाद्य की संस्कृति Culture of food

(c) संयम ही आनंद का स्वर्ण नियम है Restraint is the golden rule of enjoyment

(d) फैशन रंग-रूप का विज्ञान है Fashion is the science of appearance

(e) डिजिटल दुनिया में वित्तीय धोखाधड़ी Financial fraud in the digital world

Q2. Write a précis of the following passage by reducing it to one-third of its length. Failure to adhere to the word limit may result in deduction of marks. Do not suggest any title. The précis must be written only in the space provided for it. 20

Traditional herding practices and industrialized production of domestic animals have different effects on the environment. In modern industrialized agriculture, cattle are initially raised on open range and then transported to feedlots, where they are fattened for market. Feedlots have become widely known in recent years as sources of local pollution. The penned cattle are often crowded and are fed grain or forage that is transported to the feedlot. Manure builds up in large mounds. When it rains, the manure pollutes local streams. Feedlots are popular with meat producers because they are economical for rapid production of good-quality meat. However, large feedlots require intense use of resources and have negative environmental effects. BSIC-B-CPE 2

Traditional herding practices, by comparison, chiefly affect the environment through overgrazing. Goats are especially damaging to vegetation, but all domestic herbivores can destroy rangeland. The effect of domestic herbivores on the land varies greatly with their density relative to rainfall and soil fertility. At low to moderate densities, the animals may actually aid growth of aboveground vegetation by fertilizing soil with their manure and stimulating plant growth by clipping off plant ends in grazing, just as pruning stimulates plant growth. But at high densities, the vegetation is eaten faster than it can grow; some species are lost, and the growth of others is greatly reduced.

People have distributed cattle, sheep, goats, and horses, as well as other domestic animals, around the world and then promoted the growth of these animals to densities that have changed the landscape. Preindustrial people made such introductions. For example, Polynesian settlers brought pigs and other domesticated animals to Hawaii and other Pacific islands. Since the age of exploration by Western civilization, starting in the fifteenth century, domestic animals have been introduced into Australia, New Zealand, and the Americas. Horses, cows, sheep, and goats were brought to North America after the sixteenth century. The spread of cattle brought new animal diseases and new weeds, which arrived on the animals' hooves and in their manure. Introduction of domestic animals into new habitats has many environmental effects. Two important effects are that (1) native vegetation, not adapted to the introduced grazers, may be greatly reduced and threatened with extinction; and (2) introduced animals may compete with native herbivores, reducing their numbers to a point at which they, too, may be threatened with extinction.

A recent important issue in cattle production is the opening up of tropical forest areas and their conversion to rangeland — for example, in the Brazilian Amazon basin. In a typical situation, the forest is cleared by burning and crops are planted for about four years. After that time, the soil has lost so much fertility that crops can no longer be grown economically. Ranchers then purchase the land, already cleared, and run cattle bred to survive in the hot, humid conditions. After about another four years, the land can no longer support even grazing and is abandoned. In such areas, grazing has greatly impaired the land's capability for many uses, including forest growth. Clearly, this is an unsustainable approach to agriculture and therefore undesirable.

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The spread of domestic herbivores around the world is one of the major ways we have changed the environment through agriculture. As the human population increases, and as income and expectations rise, the demand for meat increases. As a result, we can expect greater demand for rangeland and pastureland in the next decades. A major challenge in agriculture will be to develop ways to make the production of domestic animals sustainable.

Carrying capacity is the maximum number of a species per unit area that can persist without decreasing the ability of that population or its ecosystem to maintain that density in the future. The carrying capacity of land for cattle varies with rainfall, topography, soil type, and soil fertility.

When the carrying capacity is exceeded, the land is overgrazed. Overgrazing slows the growth of the vegetation, reduces the diversity of plant species, leads to dominance by plant species that are relatively undesirable to the cattle, hastens the loss of soil by erosion as the plant cover is reduced, and subjects the land to further damage from the cattle's trampling on it. The damaged land can no longer support the same density of cattle.

(703 words)

Q3. Read the following passage and write clear and precise answers to the questions that follow, in your own words: 4x5=20

As children, when someone asked our age, we might have said, I'm four,' and added, with great solemnity, 'and a half.' We didn't want anyone to think we were only four. We had travelled so far in those few months, but then again we were modest enough to sense that the huge dignity of turning five was still quite far away. In other words, as children, we were hugely conscious of the rapidity and intensity of human development and wanted clearly to signal to others and ourselves what dramatic metamorphoses we might undergo in the course of our ordinary days and nights.

It would nowadays sound comic or a touch mad for an adult to say proudly, 'I'm twenty- five and a half' or 'forty- one and three- quarters' — because, without particularly noticing, we've drifted away from the notion that adults, too, are capable of evolutions.

Once we're past eighteen or so, our progress is still monitored but it is envisaged in different terms: it is cast in the language of material and professional advancement. The focus is on what grades have been achieved, what career has been chosen and what progress has been made in the corporate hierarchy. Development becomes largely synonymous with promotion.

But emotional growth still continues. There won't be a simple outward measure: we're no taller, we've not boosted our seniority at work and we've received no new title to confirm our matriculation to the world. Yet there have been changes nevertheless. We may, over two sleepless nights, have entirely rethought our attitude to envy or come to an important insight about the way we behave when someone compliments us. We may have made a momentous step in self- forgiveness or resolved one of the riddles of a romantic relationship.

These quiet but very real milestones don't get marked. We're not given a cake or a present to mark the moment of growth. We're not congratulated by others or viewed with enhanced respect. No one cares or even knows how caring might work. But inside, privately, we might harbour a muffled hope that some of our evolutions will be properly prized.

In an ideal world, we might have in our possession maps of emotional progress against which we could plot our faltering advance towards more sustained maturity. We might conceive of our inner developments as trips around a region, each one with distinct landmarks and staging posts, and as significant in their way as the cities of Renaissance Italy or the beauty spots on the Pacific Highway — and which we might be equally proud to have reached and come to understand our way around.

The contemporary education system proceeds under two assumptions about how we learn. First, it believes that how we are taught matters far less than what we are taught. What educates students is — it's believed — the soundness of certain arguments, not especially the manner of their delivery. Teaching should not rely on gloss and charm. It is not, and should never be, a branch of the entertainment industry.

Second, the education system assumes that once we understand something, it will stick in our minds for as long as we need it to. These minds are envisaged a little like computer hard drives: unless violently knocked, they will hold on to data for the long term. This is why we might imagine that education could stop at the age of twenty- two, once the important things have been imbibed.

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But an emotional education may require us to adopt two different starting points. For a start, how we are taught may matter inordinately, because we have ingrained tendencies to shut our ears to all the major truths about our deeper selves. Our settled impulse is to blame anyone who lays our blind spots and insufficiencies bare — unless our defences have first been adroitly and seductively appeased. In the face of critically important insights, we get distracted, proud or fidgety. We may prefer to do almost anything other than take in information that could save us.

Moreover, we forget almost everything. Our memories are sieves, not robust buckets. What seemed a convincing call to action at 8 a.m. will be nothing more than a dim recollection by midday and an indecipherable contrall in our cloudy minds by evening. Our enthusiasms and resolutions can be counted upon to fade like the stars at dawn. Nothing much sticks.

(a) Why do children solemnly specify their exact age? 4
(b) How is progress monitored once we are past eighteen years of age? 4
(c) What kind of milestones don't get marked as we grow older? 4
(d) What are the two general assumptions about learning, in the contemporary education system? 4
(e) Make sentences with the following words used in the passage, to bring out their meaning: 4
(i) inordinately
(ii) momentuous
(iii) metamorphoses
(iv) ingrained

4x5=20

We are not always able to read more than one history of an event. When we are not, we must admit that we do not have much chance of learning the truth of the matter in question - of learning what really happened. However, that is not the only reason to read history. It might be claimed that only the professional historian, the man who is writing a history himself, is required to cross- examine his sources by exhaustively checking one against the other. He must leave no stone unturned if he is to know what he ought to know about his subject. We, as lay readers of history, stand somewhere between the professional historian, on the one hand, and the irresponsible amateur, on the other hand, who reads history only for amusement.

Let us take the example of Thucydides. You may be aware that he wrote the only major contemporary history of the Peloponnesian War at the end of the fifth century B.C. In a sense, there is nothing to check his work against. What, then, can we expect to learn from it?

Greece is now a tiny country, a war that occurred there twenty- five centuries ago can have little real effect on our lives today. Everyone who fought in it is long dead, and the specific things for which they fought are long dead too. The victories are now meaningless, and the defeats without pain. The cities that were taken and lost have crumbled into dust. Indeed, if we stop to think of it, almost all that remains of the Peloponnesian War is Thucydides' account of it.

Yet that account is still important. For Thucydides' story — we might as well use that word — has had an influence on the subsequent history of man. Leaders in later eras read Thucydides. When they found themselves in situations that even faintly approximated that of the tragically divided Greek city- states, they compared their own position to that of Athens or Sparta. They used Thucydides as an excuse and a justification, and even as a pattern of conduct. The result was that by ever so little, perhaps, but perceptibly, the history of the world was changed by the view held of a small portion of it by Thucydides in the fifth century B.C. Thus we read Thucydides not because he described perfectly what happened before he wrote his book, but because he, to a certain extent, determined what happened after. And we read him, strange as this may seem, to know what is happening now.

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"Poetry is more philosophical than history," wrote Aristotle. By this he meant that poetry is more general, more universal. A good poem is true not only in its own time and place, but in all times and places. It has meaning and force for all men. History is not quite so universal as that. It is tied to events in a way that poetry is not. But any good history is also universal.

Thucydides himself said that he was writing his history so that men of the future would not have to repeat the mistakes he had seen made and from which he had suffered personally and through the agony of his country. He described the kinds of human mistakes that would have meaning to men other than himself, to men other than Greeks. Yet some of the very same errors that the Athenians and the Spartans made 2,500 years ago, or at least very similar ones, are being made now, as they have been made over and over again since Thucydides' time.

If your view of history is limited, if you go to it to discover only what really happened, you will not learn the main thing that Thucydides, or indeed any good historian, has to teach. If you read Thucydides well, you may even decide to give up trying to discover what really happened in the past.

History is the story of what led up to now. It is the present that interests us — that and the future. The future will be partly determined by the present. Thus, you can learn something about the future too, from a historian, even from one who like Thucydides lived more than two thousand years ago.

Let us sum up these two suggestions for reading history. The first is: if you can, read more than one history of an event or period that interests you. The second is: read a history not only to learn what really happened at a particular time and place in the past, but also to learn the way men act in all times and places, especially now.

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(a) How does the lay reader of history differ from the professional historian? 4
(b) Why do victories and defeats of the past become meaningless to us? 4
(c) Why do we read Thucydides despite his unverifiable accounts of Greek history? 4
(d) In what sense does history come close to poetry? 4
(e) How does history make itself relevant to the contemporary times? 4

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UPSC Previous Year Question Paper 2026-CISF-AC-EXCE-LDCE-eassy Precis Writing and Comprehension PDF Download link

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