Question:medium
Read the passage and answer the question that follows.
Vaatsalya Healthcare is one among a rapidly spreading group of "for profit" social enterprises that serve the poor and still bring in profit. Mumbai based Ziqitza, an ambulance services company, is another; it never refuses a patient for lack of money and charges only Rs. 50 to Rs. 200. Entrepreneurial minds with a social conscience are now building such models at a much faster pace than before. Varun Sahni, country director of Acumen Fund, a US based social fund that invests in companies targeting low income communities, says there has been a boom in such enterprises over the past two years, with about 1,000 of them now operating in India. These enterprises work across healthcare, education, rural energy, agriculture, arts and crafts, banking and more. "For profit" entrepreneurs care about social and environmental impact along with financial returns, and because they are answerable to investors, they try to expand the business rapidly. SKS Microfinance, for instance, started in 1998 and now has over 900,000 customers, 440 branches and an outstanding loan disbursement of over Rs. 452 crore as of August 2007.
Which of the following companies does not illustrate the idea explained by the author?
Read the passage and answer the question that follows.
Vaatsalya Healthcare is one among a rapidly spreading group of "for profit" social enterprises that serve the poor and still bring in profit. Mumbai based Ziqitza, an ambulance services company, is another; it never refuses a patient for lack of money and charges only Rs. 50 to Rs. 200. Entrepreneurial minds with a social conscience are now building such models at a much faster pace than before. Varun Sahni, country director of Acumen Fund, a US based social fund that invests in companies targeting low income communities, says there has been a boom in such enterprises over the past two years, with about 1,000 of them now operating in India. These enterprises work across healthcare, education, rural energy, agriculture, arts and crafts, banking and more. "For profit" entrepreneurs care about social and environmental impact along with financial returns, and because they are answerable to investors, they try to expand the business rapidly. SKS Microfinance, for instance, started in 1998 and now has over 900,000 customers, 440 branches and an outstanding loan disbursement of over Rs. 452 crore as of August 2007.
Which of the following companies does not illustrate the idea explained by the author?
Show Hint
Look at which option only provides money to other businesses instead of directly serving low income customers itself.
Updated On: Jul 14, 2026
- SKS Microfinance
- Acumen Fund
- Ziqitza
- Vaatsalya Healthcare
Show Solution
The Correct Option is B
Solution and Explanation
Step 1: Understanding the Question:
The passage talks about a set of "for profit" social enterprises, businesses that serve poor and low income people while still earning money and growing. We are asked which of the four listed names does NOT count as one of these enterprises.
Step 2: Key Formula or Approach:
Go back to the passage and check, for each option, whether that name is described as running a business that sells a service to the poor, or whether it is described doing something else, such as only providing funding.
Step 3: Detailed Explanation:
SKS Microfinance is described with hard numbers, over 900,000 customers, 440 branches, Rs. 452 crore in loans disbursed. That is a lender earning interest from low income borrowers, so it fits.
Ziqitza is called an ambulance services company that charges patients Rs. 50 to Rs. 200 and never refuses one for lack of money. That is also a direct paid service to the poor, so it fits.
Vaatsalya Healthcare is the enterprise the whole passage is built around, a hospital chain bringing care like paediatric surgery to smaller cities. It fits perfectly.
Acumen Fund, however, is introduced with a different job description: "a US based social fund that invests in companies that target low income communities." It hands out capital to other enterprises, it does not itself sell healthcare, transport or loans to poor customers.
Step 4: Final Answer:
Since Acumen Fund is a financing body rather than a direct service enterprise, it is the one option that does not illustrate the author's idea. \[ \boxed{\text{Acumen Fund, option B}} \]
The passage talks about a set of "for profit" social enterprises, businesses that serve poor and low income people while still earning money and growing. We are asked which of the four listed names does NOT count as one of these enterprises.
Step 2: Key Formula or Approach:
Go back to the passage and check, for each option, whether that name is described as running a business that sells a service to the poor, or whether it is described doing something else, such as only providing funding.
Step 3: Detailed Explanation:
SKS Microfinance is described with hard numbers, over 900,000 customers, 440 branches, Rs. 452 crore in loans disbursed. That is a lender earning interest from low income borrowers, so it fits.
Ziqitza is called an ambulance services company that charges patients Rs. 50 to Rs. 200 and never refuses one for lack of money. That is also a direct paid service to the poor, so it fits.
Vaatsalya Healthcare is the enterprise the whole passage is built around, a hospital chain bringing care like paediatric surgery to smaller cities. It fits perfectly.
Acumen Fund, however, is introduced with a different job description: "a US based social fund that invests in companies that target low income communities." It hands out capital to other enterprises, it does not itself sell healthcare, transport or loans to poor customers.
Step 4: Final Answer:
Since Acumen Fund is a financing body rather than a direct service enterprise, it is the one option that does not illustrate the author's idea. \[ \boxed{\text{Acumen Fund, option B}} \]
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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.
These connections were made possible by the geography of the Indian Ocean. For much of history, travel by sea was much easier than by land, which meant that port cities very far apart were often more easily connected to each other than to much closer inland cities. Historical and archaeological evidence suggests that what we now call globalisation first appeared in the Indian Ocean. This is the interconnected oceanic world referenced and produced by the novels in my book. For their part Ghosh, Gurnah, Collen and even Conrad reference a different set of histories and geographies than the ones most commonly found in fiction in English. Those [commonly found ones] are mostly centred in Europe or the US, assume a background of Christianity and whiteness, and mention places like Paris and New York. The novels in [my] book highlight instead a largely Islamic space, feature characters of colour and centralise the ports of Malindi, Mombasa, Aden, Java and Bombay. . . . It is a densely imagined, richly sensory image of a southern cosmopolitan culture which provides for an enlarged sense of place in the world.
This remapping is particularly powerful for the representation of Africa. In the fiction, sailors and travellers are not all European. . . African, as well as Indian and Arab characters, are traders, nakhodas (dhow ship captains), runaways, villains, missionaries and activists. This does not mean that Indian Ocean Africa is romanticised. Migration is often a matter of force; travel is portrayed as abandonment rather than adventure, freedoms are kept from women and slavery is rife. What it does mean is that the African part of the Indian Ocean world plays an active role in its long, rich history and therefore in that of the wider world.- CAT - 2023
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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.
Today, no scholar would be silly enough to deny that culture, history, and individual choices play a big role in many human phenomena. Scholars don't react to cultural, historical, and individual-agent explanations by denouncing "cultural determinism," "historical determinism," or "individual determinism," and then thinking no further. But many scholars do react to any explanation invoking some geographic role, by denouncing "geographic determinism" ... Several reasons may underlie this widespread but nonsensical view. One reason is that some geographic explanations advanced a century ago were racist, thereby causing all geographic explanations to become tainted by racist associations in the minds of many scholars other than geographers. But many genetic, historical, psychological, and anthropological explanations advanced a century ago were also racist, yet the validity of newer non-racist genetic etc. explanations is widely accepted today. Another reason for reflex rejection of geographic explanations is that historians have a tradition, in their discipline, of stressing the role of contingency (a favorite word among historians) based on individual decisions and chance. Often that view is warranted . . . But often, too, that view is unwarranted. The development of warm fur clothes among the Inuit living north of the Arctic Circle was not because one influential Inuit leader persuaded other Inuit in 1783 to adopt warm fur clothes, for no good environmental reason. A third reason is that geographic explanations usually depend on detailed technical facts of geography and other fields of scholarship ... Most historians and economists don't acquire that detailed knowledge as part of the professional training.- CAT - 2023
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Moreover, foragers had other options. The contemporary Hadza of Tanzania, who had long been surrounded by farmers, knew they had alternatives and rejected them. To Sahlins, this showed that foragers are not simply examples of human diversity or victimhood but something more profound: they demonstrated that societies make real choices. Culture, a way of living oriented around a distinctive set of values, manifests a fundamental principle of collective self-determination. . .
But the point [of the essay] is not so much the empirical validity of the data-the real interest for most readers, after all, is not in foragers either today or in the Paleolithic-but rather its conceptual challenge to contemporary economic life and bourgeois individualism. The empirical served a philosophical and political project, a thought experiment and stimulus to the imagination of possibilities.
With its title's nod toward The Affluent Society (1958), economist John Kenneth Galbraith's famously skeptical portrait of America's postwar prosperity and inequality, and dripping with New Left contempt for consumerism, "The Original Affluent Society" brought this critical perspective to bear on the contemporary world. It did so through the classic anthropological move of showing that radical alternatives to the readers' lives really exist. If the capitalist world seeks wealth through ever greater material production to meet infinitely expansive desires, foraging societies follow "the Zen road to affluence": not by getting more, but by wanting less. If it seems that foragers have been left behind by "progress," this is due only to the ethnocentric self-congratulation of the West. Rather than accumulate material goods, these societies are guided by other values: leisure, mobility, and above all, freedom. . .
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