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.
According to the author, which of the following options describes "for profit" entrepreneurs most appropriately?
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.
According to the author, which of the following options describes "for profit" entrepreneurs most appropriately?
Show Hint
Match the options against the passage's own line about financial returns and rapid expansion.
Updated On: Jul 14, 2026
- NRIs paying back to their motherland
- Those affluent, middle-class professionals treating it as charity
- Those who work towards getting financial returns on social business by expanding quickly
- Those who have sympathetic investors for their business ideas for the poor
Show Solution
The Correct Option is C
Solution and Explanation
The author gives a direct definition of "for profit" entrepreneurs in the passage: they care about social impact alongside financial returns, and because investors hold them accountable, they push to grow their business fast. We check each option against that definition.
- NRIs paying back to their motherland: The passage never brings up NRIs or the idea of "paying back" a home country, so this option is simply not supported by the text.
- Those affluent, middle-class professionals treating it as charity: The passage directly rejects this idea with the line "Mere charity by an affluent, middle-class professional? Far from it." This option describes the opposite of what the author is saying.
- Those who work towards getting financial returns on social business by expanding quickly: This closely echoes the passage's own words about seeking "financial returns" and trying to "expand the business rapidly", so it matches.
- Those who have sympathetic investors for their business ideas for the poor: The passage says these entrepreneurs answer to investors, it does not describe the investors as simply sympathetic backers, so this option shifts the focus away from what the passage actually says.
The only option that echoes the passage's actual definition, financial returns plus rapid expansion, is the third one.
Let's summarize:
- The passage rules out the charity framing directly.
- NRIs and sympathetic investors are never discussed in the passage.
- The passage's own words match the option about financial returns and rapid expansion.
So the correct description of "for profit" entrepreneurs is option C.
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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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