Class XII – Sociology Sample Paper – 1

Ans. (b) Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A)

Ans. (a) Both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is the correct explanation of (A)

Ans. (a) I., II., and III.

Ans. (b) Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A)

Ans. (b) India’s population is projected to increase from 1.2 billion today to an estimated 1.6 billion by 2030 due to population momentum.

Ans. (a) I. and II. only

Ans. (a) Formal demography focuses on measurements, while social demography studies causes and consequences of population changes.

Ans. (b) Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A)

Ans. (a) I., II., and III. only

Ans. (c) British industrial policies promoted the growth of Indian village industries.

Ans. (c) Mahatma Gandhi

Ans. (d) All of these

Ans. (a) Both (A) and (R) are true, and (R) is the correct explanation of (A).

Ans. (a) Both (A) and (R) are true, and (R) is the correct explanation of (A).

Ans. (d) All of the above

Ans. (a) I., II., III., IV.

Ans. Agrarian system is referred in the above mentioned statements. An agrarian system is the dynamic set of economic and technological factors that affect agricultural practices.

The basis for a prevailing agrarian system may be derived from one of a number of major types, including agrarian social structure, for example, tribal or ethnic divisions, feudal classes or family based systems.

Ans. There are basically three key principles help to explain social stratification. They are as follows

(i) It is a society wide system that unequally distributes social resources among categbries of people.

(ii) It is closely linked to the family and to the inheritance of social resources from one generation to next.

(iii) It is supported by patterns of belief or ideology.

Ans. In India, British colonialism have affected tribal communities during the pre-Independence period, on the political and economic front, tribal societies faced incursion of money lenders. They also lost their land to non-tribal immigrant settlers. Their access to forests was restricted because of the British government’s policy of reservation of forests and the introduction of mining operations. In this way, their source of livelihood was snatched by the British government.

Ans. There are several initiatives taken by the state to address the issues of caste and tribe discrimination, some of which are as follows

(i) The most important initiative of the state is the reservation. This involves the setting of reserve category for the dalits and tribal communities in different spheres of public life including reservations in educational institutions and government jobs.

(ii) In addition to reservations, there have been a number of constitutional laws passed to end, prohibit and punish caste discrimination and untouchability.

Ans. Both Karl Marx and Mahatma Gandhi saw mechanisation as danger to employment because they agreed upon the fact that the basic task of manager is to control workers and get more work out of them.

Further they argued that there are two main ways of making workers produce more. One is to extend the working hours. The other is to increase the amount that is produced within a given time period.

Ans. The age structure of the population refers to the proportion of persons in different age groups relative to the total population. The age structure changes in response to change in levels of development and the average life expectancy.

Ans. The formation of the AITUC made the colonial government more cautious in dealing with labour. It attempted to grant workers some concessions in order to contain unrest. In 1922, the government passed the Fourth Factories act which reduced the working day to 10 hours. In 1926, the Trade Unions act was passed which provided for registration of trade unions and proposed some regulations.

Ans. The reform movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries tried to address the issues that discriminated against women. The struggle was led by male reformers in this regard. Some examples are

(i) Raja Ram Mohun Roy attacked the evil practice of sati which was present in society. He opposed it on the basis of humanitarianism, natural right doctrines and Hindu shastras.

(ii) Jyotiba Phule supported the women education and opened the first school for women in Pune. (iii) MG Ranade writings supported the re-marriage of widows on the basis of shastras.

Ans. The policies of assimilation and integration are used by the state to strengthen national identity because assimilation policies, often involving outright suppression of the identities of ethnic, religious or linguistic groups, try to erode the cultural differences between groups.

On the other hand, integration policies seek to assert a single national identity by attempting to eliminate ethno-national and cultural differences from the public and political arena, while allowing them in the private domain. Both sets of policies assume a single national identity.

Ans. Rukmini Devi is facing wage discrimination i.e., discrimination on the basis of sex in the payment of wages, where Rukmini Devi and her husband perform work of similar skill, effort, and responsibility for the same employer under similar working conditions but they don’t earn the same amount of money.

This implies discriminative employers save on the cost by employing the tribal females. Rukmini Devi is working in informal labour market where there is an absence of policies to safeguard gender rights.

Ans. The economy practiced by Warli tribe is subsistence economy and simple. They use out model techniques therefore their production is insufficient. They cannot fulfill their basic needs. They try to fulfill their needs by collective efforts. Thus, the simple and collective economic life is an important characteristic of the tribal economy.

Ans. Social movements classify into three types in context of Indian society. These are as follows

(i) Redemptive social movement This movement aims to bring about a change in the personal consciousness and actions of its individual members. For instance, people in the Ezhava community in Kerala led by Narayan Guru tried to change their social practice.

(ii) Reformist social movement The movement strives to change the existing social and political arrangements through gradual incremental steps. The 1960s movement for the re-organisation of Indian states on the basis of language and the recent right to information campaign are examples of reformist movements.

(iii) Revolutionary social movement This movement attempt to radically transform social relations, often by capturing state power. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia that deposed the Tsar to capture a communist state and Naxalite movement in India that seeks to remove oppressive landlords and state officials are examples of revolutionary social movements.

Ans. The economy practiced by Warli tribe is subsistence economy and simple. They use out model techniques therefore their production is insufficient. They cannot fulfill their basic needs. They try to fulfill their needs by collective efforts. Thus, the simple and collective economic life is an important characteristic of the tribal economy.

Ans. The argument for a tribe-caste distinction was founded on an assumed cultural difference between Hindu castes, with their beliefs in purity and pollution and hierarchical integration and the tribals with their equal and kinship based modes of organisation.

The debate posed whether tribal was one end of the caste based society or a different kind of community.

There are some important viewpoints about tribe- caste distinction as follows

(i) Tribes should be seen as one end of the whole society with caste-based (Hindu) peasant society which is just less stratified and more community based. However, some opponents argued that tribes were wholly different from caste because they had no notion of purity and pollution which is central to the caste system.

(ii) There is no coherent basis for treating tribes as pristine (pure or original) or societies uncontaminated by civilisation. Rather, tribes should be seen as secondary phenomena arising out of exploitative and colonialist contact between pre-existing states and non-state groups.

Ans. The Khasi matriliny generates intense conflicts for men is following ways

(i) Khasi matriliny generates intense role conflict for men. They are torn between responsibilities to their native house on one hand and to their wife and children on the other.

(ii) There is an inherent disagreement in matrilineal systems. On the one hand, the line of descent and inheritance, where woman inherits property from her mother and passes it on to her daughter.

The other structure of authority and control is where a man control his sister’s property and passes on control to his sister’s son. The farmer, which links the mother to the daughter, comes in conflict with the latter, which links the mother’s brother to the sister’s son.

(iii) The tension generated by such role conflict affects Khasi women more intensely. A woman can never be fully assured that her husband does not find his sister’s house a more pleasant place than her own.

Thus, men are the power holders in Khasi society, the only difference is that a man’s relatives on his mother’s side matter more than his relatives on his father’s side.

Ans. Permanent traits of tribal communities in India include region, language, physical characteristics and ecological habitat.

On the basis of language, tribes are categorised into four categories, namely Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austric and Tibeto-Burman. The Indo-Aryan accounts for 1% of the population and the Dravidian accounts for 3%. The other two languages are primary spoken by tribals having 80% of the concentration.

On the basis of physical characteristics, tribes are classified under the Negrito, Australoid, Mongoloid, Dravidian and Aryan categories. The last two are shared by the majority of the Indian population.

In terms of size, tribes may vary in great number. The biggest tribes are the Gonds, Bhils, Santhals, Oraons, Minas Bodos and Mundas. The total population of tribes amounts to about 8.2% of the Indian population or 84 million people according to 2001 Census which has grown to 8.6% or 104 million tribal population according to 2011 Census.

Ans. Social stratification is supported by patterns of belief, or ideology because no system of social stratification is likely to persist over generations, unless it is widely viewed as being either fair or inevitable.

For example, the caste system is justified in terms of the opposition of purity and pollution, with the Brahmins designated as the most superior and Dalits as the most inferior by virtue of their birth and occupation. Not everyone, though, thinks of a system of inequality as legitimate.

Typically, people with the greatest social privileges express the strongest support for systems of stratification such as caste and race. Those who have experienced the exploitation and humiliation of being at the bottom of the hierarchy are most likely to challenge it

Ans. Communalism is an important issue in India because it has been a recurrent source of tension and violence. During communal riots, people become faceless members of their respective communities. Every religious community has faced this violence in greater or lesser degree, although the proportionate impact is far more traumatic for minority communities.

Communalism is an aggressive political ideology linked to religion. Communal means something related to a community or collectivity as different from an individual. It is important to emphasise that communalism is about politics and not about religion. There is no necessary relationship between personal faith and communalism. One of the characteristic feature of communalism is its claim that religious identity overrides everything else.

Ans. The Green Revolution means increasing production of food grains by using High Yielding Variety (HYV) seeds especially of wheat and rice. It was a government programme of agricultural modernisation which was funded by international agencies. The programme of Green Revolution was introduced only in those areas that had abundant irrigation. But only some parts of the country could reap the benefits of Green Revolution like that of Punjab, Western Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and some parts of Tamil Nadu.

There were many social consequences of Green Revolution, which are as follows

(i) The agricultural productivity increased very rapidly and the medium and large farmers who produced a surplus for the market got the maximum benefit through Green Revolution.

(ii) Small and marginal farmers could not benefit from Green Revolution as they could not buy new seeds and technology. It was only large farmers who were able to benefit from the new technology.

(iii) The excessive use of pesticides hybrid seeds, etc., that needed assured irrigation also brought negative impacts. Many farmers shifted from multi-crop system to mono-crop system.

Ans. Gandhiji’s viewpoint on the growing relevance of machinery included the following points

(i) He was deeply critical of the modern age in which machines enslaved human beings and displaced workers.

(ii) He argued that the growing importance of machinery would lead to mechanisation and mechanisation possess a threat to the labourers by substituting them for the machines.

(iii) He also pointed out how the craze of mechanisation and machinery took exploitative profit. These exploitative measures impacted the workers directly.

(iv) He believed that modern machinery would lead to a concentration of wealth in a few hands.

Ans. (a) The sex ratio refers to the number of females per 1000 males in a given area at a specified time period. Despite the fact that slighty more males are born than female ones, historically, there are slightly more females than males.

In other words, sex ratio favour females. This is because of the factor where girl babies have high resistance to diseases in infancy.

Ans. (b) The declining sex ratio were 972 females per 1000 males at the turn of the 20th century, the sex ratio has declined to 943 at the turn of 21st century. It decreased 29 points from 1901 to 2011.

Ans. (c) The decade 1991 – 2011 represents an anomaly in that overall sex ratio has shown an increase of 16 points from 927 to 943.

Ans. This is a fact that all sections of people are not benefitted from the liberalisation policies in India because the effect of liberalisation is not uniform on all sections. There are some major consequences after the effects of liberalisation.

These are as follows

(i) After this policy, the government tried to sell its share in several public sector companies, a process which is known as called disinvestment. With disinvestment, many government workers feared that they will lose their jobs.

(ii) More and more companies are reducing the number of permanent employees and outsourcing their work to smaller companies or even to homes. For the multinational companies, this outsourcing is done across the globe, with developing countries like India providing cheap labour.

As small companies have to compete for orders from the big companies, they keep wages low as well as their working conditions are often poor.

(iii) Very few people in India have access to secure jobs and even the small number in regular salaried employed are becoming more insecure with incoming of contract labour. Now-a- days, employment by government is also coming down. According to economists, both liberalisation and privatisation is associated with rising income inequality.

(iv) As the secure employment in large industry is declining, the government is embarking on the policy of land acquisition for industry. These industries do not necessarily provide employment to the people of the surrounding areas, but cause major pollution.

Ans. (a) The challenges faced by rural people are as follows

(i) There is a lack of availability of resources and infrastructure in the rural regions in India. There is no availability of benches, playgrounds, laboratories, washrooms or if present they are in the worst condition. (ii) Sometimes the textbooks are not available in proper quantity, or if available they are not in good condition. Also, the availability of stationery is also a challenge. Many rural Indians don’t have enough money to bear stationary charges and other expenses.

(iii) There is no transportation availability as there is poor connectivity from one place to another place.

(iv) There is less availability of teachers. In India, the school in rural areas have only one or two teachers in the school.

Ans. (b) The rural people migrate to cities due to following factors

(i) Environmental Factors Natural disasters are a common factor that pushes rural residents to migrate to urban cities. This includes events that may immediately displace people, such as floods, droughts, wildfires, and intense weather.

(ii) Social Factors Increased access to quality education and health care facilities are a common pull factor in rural-to- urban migration. Rural areas often lack government services when compared to their urban counterparts. More government spending often goes towards providing public services in cities.

(iii) Economic Factors Employment and educational opportunities are cited as the most common pull factors associated with rural-to-urban migration.1 Poverty, food insecurity, and lack of opportunities in rural areas are a consequence of uneven economic development and push people to urban areas where development has been greater. When rural people migrate to urban areas for better prospects leaving behind everything. The negative impact of migration on rural communities are there is labour shortage in farms, only senior citizens, women and children are left behind, increase in child labour, children’s are forced, to work in fields, increased workload for women’s decreased population, disorganization of family, customs and in this way rural culture slowly fades away.