Question:medium
According to the article, Sangwan-Vemuganti team's cutting-edge procedure of implanting cornea grown from stem cells is considered a major advancement by the experts because
According to the article, Sangwan-Vemuganti team's cutting-edge procedure of implanting cornea grown from stem cells is considered a major advancement by the experts because
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Contrast the phrase "not ones derived from embryos" with what other teams elsewhere are attempting, and note the team's success is specific to corneas.
Updated On: Jul 14, 2026
- They derive stem cells from embryos.
- Their labs are customised to grow stem cells.
- They regrow cells in hearts, brains, livers with stem cells from tissues of living adults.
- They derive stem cells from tissues of living adults and grow cells in labs.
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The Correct Option is D
Solution and Explanation
This comprehension question asks why experts consider the Sangwan-Vemuganti procedure a breakthrough. The clue sits in the second paragraph of the passage, which contrasts their method with what other stem cell teams around the world are doing.
- They derive stem cells from embryos: The passage says the opposite, that the team uses adult stem cells, "not ones derived from embryos." This option is wrong.
- Their labs are customised to grow stem cells: Nothing in the passage credits their success to special lab equipment or customisation. This is not supported.
- They regrow cells in hearts, brains, livers with stem cells from tissues of living adults: This describes what other teams around the world are trying, with progress described as slow, not what the Hyderabad team achieved. Their success is in corneas.
- They derive stem cells from tissues of living adults and grow cells in labs: This lines up exactly with the passage: adult stem cells, grown successfully into corneal tissue, with 80 procedures a year and lasting results in 56 percent of cases.
The fourth option captures both halves of what makes the work notable: the ethically simpler adult-cell source and the lab success in growing it into usable tissue.
Let's summarize:
- The team avoids embryonic stem cells entirely, using adult cells instead.
- Their real achievement is growing those adult cells into working corneal tissue in the lab.
The correct option is the fourth one, describing the use of adult stem cells grown in labs.
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Top Questions on Reading Comprehension
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For early postcolonial literature, the world of the novel was often the nation. Postcolonial novels were usually [concerned with] national questions. Sometimes the whole story of the novel was taken as an allegory of the nation, whether India or Tanzania. This was important for supporting anti-colonial nationalism, but could also be limiting - land-focused and inward looking.
My new book "Writing Ocean Worlds" explores another kind of world of the novel: not the village or nation, but the Indian Ocean world. The book describes a set of novels in which the Indian Ocean is at the centre of the story. It focuses on the novelists Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Lindsey Collen and Joseph Conrad [who have] centred the Indian Ocean world in the majority of their novels. . . Their work reveals a world that is outward-looking full of movement, border-crossing and south-south interconnection. They are all very different - from colonially inclined (Conrad) to radically anti-capitalist (Collen), but together draw on and shape a wider sense of Indian Ocean space through themes, images, metaphors and language. This has the effect of remapping the world in the reader's mind, as centred in the interconnected global south. ... The Indian Ocean world is a term used to describe the very long-lasting connections among the coasts of East Africa, the Arab coasts, and South and East Asia.
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Many human phenomena and characteristics - such as behaviors, beliefs, economies, genes, incomes, life expectancies, and other things - are influenced both by geographic factors and by non-geographic factors. Geographic factors mean physical and biological factors tied to geographic location, including climate, the distributions of wild plant and animal species, soils, and topography. Non-geographic factors include those factors subsumed under the term culture, other factors subsumed under the term history, and decisions by individual people.... [T]he differences between the current economies of North and South Korea ... cannot be attributed to the modest environmental differences between [them] ... They are instead due entirely to the different [government] policies ... At the opposite extreme, the Inuit and other traditional peoples living north of the Arctic Circle developed warm fur clothes but no agriculture, while equatorial lowland peoples around the world never developed warm fur clothes but often did develop agriculture. The explanation is straightforwardly geographic, rather than a cultural or historical quirk unrelated to geography. . . Aboriginal Australia remained the sole continent occupied only by hunter/gatherers and with no indigenous farming or herding ... [Here the] explanation is biogeographic: the Australian continent has no domesticable native animal species and few domesticable native plant species. Instead, the crops and domestic animals that now make Australia a food and wool exporter are all nonnative (mainly Eurasian) species such as sheep, wheat, and grapes, brought to Australia by overseas colonists.
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