SAMPLE PRECIS
with
SOLUTIONS
1. Make a Précis of the following passage in 150 words and give it a suitable title.
India’s merchandise trade deficit widened to a monthly record of $23.33 billion in May, as exports
grew 15.5% to $37.3 billion while imports jumped 56.1% to $60.62 billion, as per preliminary data
from the Commerce and Industry Ministry. The previous highest monthly trade deficit was last
November’s $22.91 billion.
Goods exports shrank 7.2% from April’s $40.19 billion of outbound trade, resulting in the merchandise
trade deficit for the first two months of 2022-23 widening to $41.73 billion. The figure for April-May
2021 was $21.82 billion.
While petroleum exports, which surged 52.7% from May 2021, electronics (41.5%) and readymade
textile garments (22.9%), led the exports growth last month, the overall growth rate almost halved to
an 8.1% pace if petroleum exports were excluded. May’s overall export growth was the slowest in 15
months.
This is the third month in a row that India’s merchandise imports have crossed $60 billion, thanks to
elevated commodity and oil prices amid the festering Russia-Ukraine conflict. Gold imports shot up
almost nine fold year-on-year to cross $5.8 billion, and was more than triple April’s $1.7 billion.
“With base effects catching up, the pace of growth of goods exports and then later, imports, is likely
to moderate, while remaining high in absolute terms as commodity prices are seeing a renewed
uptick,” ICRA chief economist said. “We believe the merchandise trade deficit will print between $20
billion to $25 billion for most months of 2022-23,”.
Petroleum imports almost doubled to $18.1 billion, but were 10.3% lower than April’s bill of over $20
billion. Coal imports more than doubled from May 2021 levels to $5.33 billion, and were also 8% higher
sequentially.
Excluding petroleum, imports stood at $42.48 billion, reflecting a lower growth rate of 44.7%. If gold,
silver and precious metal imports were also excluded, imports grew at a slower 27.2% rate to $33.6
billion.
“In the short and medium term, there are fears of demand slowdown in advanced economies which
could potentially dent the exports momentum,” said Mahesh Desai, chairman of the Engineering
Export Promotion Council (EEPC) of India.
Last month, rating agency ICRA had projected a record merchandise trade deficit of $250-255 billion
for 2022-23, with exports growth slowing to about 9% during the year and imports expected to rise
16% as domestic demand is anticipated to outpace external demand.
Solution –
TRADE DEFICIT: FEAR FOR INDIA
Projection of ICRA rating agency high trade deficit of $250-255 billion in 2022-23 generated fear in the
economy of India. With expectation of high domestic demand imports will surpass the exports leading
to trade deficit. Russia-Ukraine war had resulted in increase in prices of oil and petroleum products.
India having major part of these products in its imported products is importing inflation in the country.
Chairman of EEPC of India shows concerned about the future reduction in exports due to low demand
expectation of developed economies. Similar concerned showed by ICRA's chief economist of
increasing trade deficit even though the absolute increase in level of export and import both but the
later surpass the former is a threat to countries international position.
2. Make a Précis of the following passage in 150 words and give it a suitable title.
It’s taboo but we all think about it. We are told it’s not good to talk or even think about death.
We are all going to die. Death is a shadow that follows all the time. The recent pandemic had reminded
us that death is always close by, one can face it any time, even the very next moment, there is nothing
to be scared of it, and it is a fate we all will share.
Logically, all of us know that we are going to die but emotionally we feel invincible, and that is why we
waste our time complaining so much, rather than being grateful enough. It’s all because we don’t have
the right perception of death.
If you are going to die tomorrow, what will you do on your last day in this world? Would you rather
waste your time thinking about the future or do something that will give you deep fulfilment and make
your “now” more enjoyable.
Contemplating death puts things into perspective. We are here to experience life. It is just like a
football game. The match starts when we are born, and when the final whistle blows, it’s all over.
There is no point in complaining about the weather, about your teammates not playing right. All you
can do is go out there and do the best you can to score a goal.
Contemplating death makes you understand how precious this present moment is. The present never
comes back. Future is just a concept; it never exists, what exists is now.
Awareness of death makes you feel liberated. Why will you not do something without thinking about
what others might think of you? You are going to die one day. That day, the things that you are scared
of won’t matter. All your problems just won’t matter, so invest your time in something that makes you
happy.
The more you think about the inevitable death the more liberated you will be. Contemplating death
makes you grateful for everything you have, everything you think, and all the experiences.
Look around for a second, look at the trees, the birds, and the people. There will come a time when
everything that you see now will not exist, so every second spent with it is precious.
We are all going towards death, then why not say things that you never dared to say, forgiving the
people with whom in the past you had negative experiences, and being grateful to people who had
always been with you and had positively changed your life.
Becoming aware of your mortality is an awakening experience. It might help you in living your life
authentically and entirely, and perhaps for the first time, you will truly be free.
Solution –
Title - Contemplating death makes us enjoy life more.
Live as if we are to die tomorrow - this is what we need to follow in our lives. Death is inevitable and
we do not know when it will come for us. What we can do is to enjoy the time we have with us.
Enjoying in the present and not thinking about the future must be our response. Contemplating death
enables us to understand the importance of the present moment so that we enjoy and be grateful for
what we have. Being aware that we are eventually going to die makes us live more freely and makes
our life enjoyable. It enables us to do things which we earlier feared and have better relationships in
life. Ultimately. It is for us to enjoy this awakening experience in life and make our life a memorable
one.
3. Make a Précis of the following passage in 150 words and give it a suitable title.
Energy management by the source nation is essential in a smart city. The main and major objective
of integrated energy management is to achieve and maintain sustainable energy realised at the
ground level; side-by-side, measures to conserve energy must be executed. Excessive utilisation of any
energy source such as coal or oil for generation of electricity causes plights of problems like acid rain
and increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Hydroelectric power stations and atomic energy stations were championed for curtailing
dependence on oil and coal for generating electricity. Huge dams can contribute considerably to
economic growth in developing countries’ short of electricity like India, but there must be a
compromise regarding the case of large-scale electricity generation. Reservoirs deluge wildlife
habitats, forests and farmland and even eradicate communities of native people. In order to meet the
growing demand, efficient utilisation of energy and its conservation are preponderant factors.
Energy is the key resource to industrial development. It is generated both from commercial sources
such as petroleum, coal, hydroelectric plants and non-commercial sources like fuel-wood, cow-dung
and agricultural wastes. The index of economic advancement attained by a country is the consumption
of commercial energy per head. However, India consumes a very low amount of commercial energy
per head— one-eighth of the world average.
Commercial energy supplies a little over half of the total energy used in the country, and the rest
comes from non-commercial sources. Since the last two and half a decade, agriculture has been
consuming commercial energy at a greater rate. However, now the twin factors, environmental
conservation and energy generation, are emerging from exploitative interaction of man with natural
resources.
Methodical management of energy is critical to a smart city because it largely depends on power. It is
maintained by technologies like smart metering, cloud computing and wireless connected sensors.
Smart meters allow two-way monitoring from both the utility providers and the end-user to monitor
consumption, loads of peak hours etc.
These systems provide information essential to the citizens in order to help better manage their plan
tariffs. Furthermore, smart cities also use ‘smart grids’, i.e. power grids integrated with controls,
automation and latest technologies to boost efficient transmission and quicker restoration of power
on outages or other incidences, cut down overall operation and management costs and combine
renewable energy systems. Besides these, they offer financial incentives to the consumers for shifting
the electrical demand during off-peak hours. Above all, smart grids give opportunities to save energy
and at the same time reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Smart city provides seamless and integrated
public transport and communication networks in multiple modes—rail, metro, bus and non-motorised
transportation (walking and cycling). Preferably, ICT is integrated with the transport networks with a
view to allowing real-time tracking and increasing citizen access to information on transportation.
Directed parking and volume-based traffic control systems are the measures that help handling traffic
challenges and improve flexibility.
Energy policy now has two ways. One leads to the fossil fuels or the hard way, which means to go on
as we have been for many years i.e. giving importance to energy quantity by discovering more
amounts of fossil fuels and building larger power plants.
The second way is the soft one which leads to the energy substitutes that lay importance on energy
quality and are also renewable, flexible and more eco-friendly. The soft way depends mainly on
renewable energy that includes sunlight, wind, biomass, tidal energy etc. and waste management to
create energy.
This initiative will certainly help cities and regions to undertake ambitious and spearheading measures
in order to reduce the emission of greenhouse gas through sustainable utilisation and production of
energy. This will need methodical approaches and organisational innovation, incorporating energy
efficiency, low carbon technologies and the efficient management of supply and demand. The
principal constituents of this initiative would comprise especially steps on buildings, local energy
networks and transport.
The final goal of the ‘Smart Cities’ is the design of energy neutral cities with the least carbon dioxide
emissions. In smart cities, people are creators in an urban context where sustainable environment
plays a crucial role. Best utilisation of waste to energy helps maintaining a high quality of the use of
technology through ICT and many other endeavours.
The pinpointed cities would be designed in partnership with Centre, State and urban local bodies in
a public-private partnership (PPP) model. The Centre will pay the viability gap funding (VGF) for
undertaking the initiative. The Government of
India realises the importance of promoting industrial energy efficiency for handling competitiveness,
reducing total energy demand and the emission of greenhouse gases. The Govt. of India has built
industrial corridors, like Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor, Delhi-Chennai Industrial Corridor etc. in
order to make transportation effective with the help of modern roadways that connect the rural areas
with the urban ones easily with a view to meet the urban demands and reduce the gap of supply
and cut down the consumption of fuel. The venture by the Govt. to build these economic corridors is
certainly positive. Apart from the technological challenges, there should be change in the standard of
society and lifestyle, and in parallel to this energy saving attitudes must be adopted. Therefore,
development of smart cities and sustainable transport systems, where electricity will play as the
sustainable carrier, are essential to bring these attitudes into reality, whereas development of smart
grid at distribution level helps building smart cities.
Solution –
Title - Management of energy in smart cities.
Energy conservation is considerably a quick and economical way to solve the problem of power
shortage and a way of saving the country’s finite sources of energy, and the conservation procedures
need relatively smaller investments, are cost-effective and also have short evolution as well as
payback periods. The smart cities will focus on the development of smart energy efficient buildings,
greener environment, and cleaner atmosphere and minimising energy consumption, without any
compromise with comfort. Modern technology symbolises the age of energy positive buildings ready
at hand for both domestic and office use optimised by thermal storage technology. Therefore, smart
cities will meet the energy requirements of India in future and help increasing the sustainable and
efficient energy. Further advancements in energy security will help India to become a global icon.
4. Make a Précis of the following passage in 150 words and give it a suitable title.
Gender issues and ‘women-empowerment’ has become the new buzzword across the globe in the last
few decades. The increased familiarity with this term has resulted in the slow transformation of most
of the ideologies that have justified inequalities in the social structures for the past so many years.
The emerging debates that surround the concept of ‘empowerment’ have had considerable effects on
the well-established roots of the institutions that provide support to the existing power structures
such as family, state etc. Women have started to become aware of the limitations and confines of the
territories within which they have been placed all these years. They have demanded control over their
own bodies, equal spaces in the social institutions and an acknowledgment for their identity. Last few
years have witnessed a sharp increase in the strategies of women’s development by the state in order
to eliminate the gender gaps in the work opportunities, political participation, health facilities and
distribution of resources.
India as a nation has taken significant steps to fill the gender gaps existing in the societies here. The
constitution of India provides equality of employment opportunity, voting rights and equal pay for
equal work. It lays great emphasis on the dignity of women and constitutes several pro-visions like
maternity reliefs to maintain a gender-sensitive environment at the workplace. Government schemes
like ‘Beti bachao-Beti padhao’, ‘janani suraksha’, intend to ensure the better health care and education
facilities. Policies like ‘New National Policy for Women’ endeavour to follow the ‘so-cially inclusive
rights-based approach’ for the women empowerment. Apart from this, the introduction of Gender
Budget Statement promises a just distribution of resources in the country across gender divisions as
well.
The past decade has also experienced an expansion of the definitions of terms like ‘rape’ and ‘violence’
in the legal context. Law has enlarged its frame in order to bring the exploitation of women in private
and public sphere through the formulations of laws like Protection of Women from Domestic Violence
Act, 2005’ and ‘Sexual Harassment of Women at Work Place (Prevention, Prohibition & Redressal) Act,
2013’. Institutions like the National Commission for Women have been formed to identify and register
the cases of oppression faced by women. Ministry of Women and Child Development is specifically
dedicated to addressing the issues, policies and their implementations related to the women and
children in the country.
India has observed immense changes in its socio-political and economic conditions by the introduction
of these measures as well as under the impact of globalization and technological advancements.
Census 2001-2011 has recorded a significant rise in the literacy rate of women. The expansion of the
service sector has generated fresh work opportunities for women. To a large extent, equality in the
wages and participating roles among the women and men can be seen in the urban areas. It is in these
areas that the phenomenon of ‘emerging women power’ is being most acutely observed.
Women are dominating the key positions in many fields that were earlier denied to them. The
emergence of women to the strategic positions in the social structures has given way to a relatively
better understanding and identification of the oppressive practices. However, these transformations
seem to be insignificant when compared to the number of issues that continue to degenerate the
conditions of women in the society. Also, new challenges have emerged that impede the holistic
development of women.
Crime against women has been on the rampant rise in the country along with the growth in the
number of career-oriented women in the professional space. Cyber crimes such as sexual harassment
and molestation of women through the internet and mobile devices have gone up along with the
technological development in the country. As the nation basks in the various scientific and economic
achievements, half of its population writhes under the fear of rape, trafficking, domestic violence,
honour killing, acid attacks, and sexual harassments. Child marriage, dowry demands, and female
infanticide remain a harsh reality even after the strict attempts of their prohibition through the law.
These practices are the major reasons behind the skewed sex ratio in the society.
While the country congratulates itself on the achieving the Millennium Development Goal of gender
parity at the primary school level, it has done little to overcome the high dropout rates of female
students. As the country boasts of women holding the significant chairs in governance like Head of the
state, Speaker of Lok Sabha, eminent ministries and top-notch places in the corporate sectors and
strategic positions in other arenas of productivity, a large number of women are struggling for their
livelihoods as migrant labourers and low paid workers in the informal sector. According to a recently
released Monster Salary Index, there exists a gender pay gap of 27% in the country. The overlapping
of gender issues with several other issues like caste and poverty worsens the plight of women
belonging to these categories. Women workforce in the rural areas that is more exposed to these
tribulations comparatively experiences larger pay gaps. India records a High Maternal Mortality Rate
and a large number of women suffer from anaemia in the face of the new schemes continuously
launched by the government to improve the health conditions of women. The discrimination and
violence faced by the women also have deep-rooted effects on their mental health which goes largely
unnoticed by the government policies. The concept of ‘emerging women power’ seems to be eyewash
in the context of these ground realities.
Most of the measures adopted by the state follow the top-down approach and essentially consider
women as mere beneficiaries of the welfare schemes. Women are not empowered to understand and
confront the structures of patriarchy. ‘Decision making’ which is emphasized upon in the process of
empowering women, have to emerge out of knowledge and informed mediation to instill changes in
the familial structures and social arrangements that would help in the evolution of gender roles.
Solution –
Title - The reality of women today.
It is imperative to probe the ground realities of catchy headlines like ‘the new emerging women power’
adds more substance and nuance to the discourse on gender justice. These nuances do not refuse the
accomplishments achieved so far by society but actually point towards the remaining distance which
still needs to be covered. Identification of the problem areas and weaknesses is the first step towards
their eradication. India has shown a dedicated will to bring changes by pledging to achieve the
Sustainable Development Goals which include ideals of gender justice and women empowerment.
Only with constructive planning and comprehensive changes at various levels in society the new
emerging "women power" shall be soon able to realize its complete potential in India.
5. Make a Précis of the following passage in 150 words and give it a suitable title.
Broken bridges, Russian tanks trampling cars full of passengers, buildings destroyed by missile strikes,
hospitals full of injured citizens, people sheltering everywhere, children crying, hundreds of dead
bodies, and a photo of Kira Rudi, a female parliamentarian from Ukraine holding a Kalashnikov rifle,
challenging Russia. There are a number of such reports coming from all over Ukraine, but President
Volodymyr Zelensky knows that wars cannot be won by just emotion. That is why he appealed to the
superpowers to intervene immediately. He said what is needed is immediate strategic help and
nothing else. This helplessness of Zelensky is enough to show the destruction caused by Russian
President Vladimir Putin. Almost a week has passed, but the global fraternity could not do anything as
expected. Ukraine is the latest example of this bitter reality of how superpowers use small countries
to fulfil their sinister ambitions.
Ever since he took office, Putin has been eyeing the ‘old glory’ of his country. He snatched Crimea
from Ukraine, eight years ago. In 2008, he attacked Georgia. Even then, the US and the rhetorical did
nothing. Once the great empress of Russia, Tsar Catherine, said we needed a window to the world. By
‘window’ she meant the port. She tore Poland to pieces for this. Is Putin pursuing a similar agenda? It
would be naive to expect Russia to back down easily.
Putin has his own arguments to justify the war. By the time the Cold War ended in 1991, there were
16 countries in NATO. The number has now grown to 30. Russia considers this a violation of mutual
consent. The Kremlin feels that its country is under siege. Would this issue be resolved by a war? I am
not sure, since even after the biggest warfare, one has to finally sit at the negotiating table. Taking
these historical lessons into account, why not begin a proper discussion right away? But how can this
be accomplished? We live in a deluded world that is being run by dwarf politicians. They may be
patriotic, but the world view and insight needed to run the world are not present with any politician
in the present era. We already felt this during the deadly pandemic.
More than 20,000 Indians are currently stranded in Ukraine. The government is trying to bring them
back at its own expense.
One more thing. Putin has knowingly or unknowingly strengthened China. Due to economic sanctions
imposed on his country, much of that business will now take its route through China. Not only this,
the attention of the world is also shifting from China to Russia. Of course, New Delhi will be keeping a
close watch on the situation. It’s time to be careful.
Solution-
Title - Need for a rational approach to subside war.
Despite an appeal made by the President of Ukraine to international community to assist them from
attacks by Russia, no help could be sought. The reports coming from the crisis in Ukraine reflect the
inclination of superpowers to seize the power from small nations. These bold moves by Russia are not
new. The similar incidence in Crimea and Georgia showcases the intent of Russia to show 'window to
the world', said by one empress of Russia. While, the increase in NATO members has been disapproved
by Russia, as they feel anxious of growth of this alliance. The war is no solution. When a table
conference can deal with situation of conflict, there is no need for war. The situation is aggravated
due to the absence of rational and insightful political leaders. The Indian Government is bringing back
its stranded citizens in Ukraine. While, the bigger thing to worry about is the growing focus of
businesses in China due to sanctions imposed on Russia.
