1 Being a woman in any other century must have been bad enough. Try being ill. There were no antibiotics until the 1930s, and a patient in a Victorian hospital was probably only marginally better off than if he’d stayed at home. Last century saw large parts of the world finally rid themselves of the plagues that periodically wiped out single and even double figure percentages of entire populations. Cholera and other epidemics ravaged European cities throughout the 19th century. 2 Global warming is perhaps the most serious part of the mindset that says things are getting inexorably worse.... Show more

1 Being a woman in any other century must have been bad enough. Try being ill. There were no antibiotics until the 1930s, and a patient in a Victorian hospital was probably only marginally better off than if he’d stayed at home. Last century saw large parts of the world finally rid themselves of the plagues that periodically wiped out single and even double figure percentages of entire populations. Cholera and other epidemics ravaged European cities throughout the 19th century.
2 Global warming is perhaps the most serious part of the mindset that says things are getting inexorably worse. Most scientists, though not all, agree that something is going on. Yet there is little evidence to support the most outlandish predictions of doom.
3 Of course our world has new horrors: drug addiction, global terrorism, and in particular the conflict between wildlife and people that will almost certainly lead to the extinction of several of what biologists call the "charismatic megafauna" by the end of this century. It will be sad to live in a world without pandas or tigers, but we may have to.
4 There is a crisis of confidence among many people, especially the young, in the West. While our material needs have, for the most part, been accommodated, our psychological welfare has been given some severe knocks. In the new century, the seemingly global epidemics of anxiety, depression and stress wifi need to be addressed with as much vigour as TB and malaria were in the last. Then there’s AIDS, of course proving that the old spectre of infectious diseases is very much with us.
5 It is possible that something may come out of the blue and get us. It seems that nuclear war remains the most plausible short-term threat to our civilization, but we cannot discount the possibility of a terrifying genetically mutated viral plague wiping us out in weeks; or of some particle physics experiment going terribly wrong. Clearly we need to be on our guard.
6 Why do we persist in believing that things are getting worse ? It has always been thus, and we always forget the previous, failed merchants of doom : Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 prophecy that a population explosion would lead to starvation in America by the 1980s ; all those silly pundits claiming that the world would end on January 1, 2000, as the millennium bug struck.
7 Today is good; we live in the freest, healthiest, most peaceful and longest lived era in
human history. The future barring some calamitous accident, will be better. The past truly is a different country—a hungry, violent, bigoted place. They did things differently there. Good riddance to them. (438 words)

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow choosing the correct options from the ones given below each question :

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