Directions : for Q. Nos. 31 to 45. Given below are two passages (I and II) followed by the questions based on the contents of the passages. Answer the questions based on the contents of the passage.

         We are constantly told that information technology will take us to a gleaming, gigabyte infested other world called Cyberspace. Baloney ! The Industrial Revolution did not take us to Motorspace; it brought motors into our lives. The Information Revolution will do the same, introducing new tools which we will use to serve our ancient human needs. This new movement is not about multimedia, virtual reality or even the mighty World Wide Web. It is about an emerging information marketplace in which computers and their users everywhere will buy, sell and freely exchange information and “information work”.

          When people talk about information they think of the traditional content of books, newspapers, television and radio which represent about 5% of the U.S. economy. No one talks about information work — the activity people and machines perform when they transform information which accounts for 60% of the U.S. economy. Information work will take many guises in the informtion marketplace. Imagine a doctor in Sri Lanka examining a homeless person in a San Francisco clinic who is connected by means of a few electrodes to a diagnostic kiosk with a nurse standing by. The doctor provides human information work — his medical diagnostic skill for $2.00 a visit. The information marketplace will bring this and many other new tools into our lives through electronic bulldozers and electronic proximity.

          In the industrial era, mechanical bulldozes allowed workers to throw away their shovels and offload their muscle work on machines. Today we squint our eyes and scorch our brains in front of inscrutable mail headers and pages of impenetrable text. We are still shovelling with our eyes and brains but dismiss the drudgery because our silicon-studded shovels make us feel modern. It is time we shed the shovels and exploited electronic bulldozers.

          New tools like e-forms will make this easier than it sounds. To fill in a travel-form for example, all I have to type or say out loud is “Computer take us to Athens this weekend”. My machine knows that us means two and that we prefer business class. It calls the airline computer and after a few exchanges, the machines complete the booking. It takes me three seconds to give my command and it takes the machines ten minutes to finish the job — a 20,000% productivity gain. Electronic bulldozer tools like this will get much of our information work done. We will increase our productivity further by making our machines truly easier to use. One good way is to speak to them. Speech understanding systems are finally becoming technologically mature and affordable.

          The changes arising from the second major new force — electronic proximity will be just as large. As the information marketplace develops we will be closer to a thousand times more people than we were with the automobile. Within a decade, half a billion people and machines will be squeezed into one gigantic electronic city block. The closeness will lead to powerful benefits through groupwork and telework but also to info predators and new kinds of crimes. I don’t expect the ratio of good to bad will change; the angels and devils are within us, not in our machines.

          Electronic proximity will strengthen tribalism. Ethnic groups scattered across the globe will have a way to unite, perhaps even extending the meaning of a nation from a land mass to an ethnic network. At the same time, electronic proximity will strengthen diversity, because when people from different ethnic groups meet within a “tribe” of classical music buffs for example, they will get to know one another within that subgroup. This won’t lead to a universal global culture but a thin veneer of shared norms. It will alsos give rise to new projects that have worthy human purposes like a Virtual Compassion Corps which could match the providers of human help with thos worldwide who need it. Electronic proximity will untimately lead to increased democratization not wo much because information will traverse national borders but because even totalitarian nations will want to participate in the major new economic force of the 21st century. To do so they will have to play by the rules of engagement made by the predominantly democratic nations that will establish information marketplace.

         The information marketplace will create problems too. Unless we intervene, it will increase the gap between rich and poor nations because the rich will be able to afford the electronic bulldozers while the poor will not. Electronic proximity will inundate us with info junk, creating a need for human intermediaries who can help us find what we want. And elecrnic proximity will be perceived by some as a license to attack cultures that took thousands of years to build. National leaders will not doubt use politics and technology to protect their cultures against such info-assaults. They will also need to negotiate how to handle cross border information violations as they did earlier with international crime and trade. Because of the widespread changes it will foster, the Information Revolution will earn its place in hisotry as the socio-economic movement, following Agrarian and Industrial Revolution. May be then, having understood the plough, the motor and the computer, we will dare to go beyond artifacts and embark upon the fourth revolution — striving to understand ourselves.