Directions: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below. Certain words are printed in capital letters to help you locate them while answering some of the questions.
Most new medicines succeed in the market by being used as widely as possible. A drug that lowers blood pressure earns more the more patients take it, and its makers spend heavily to persuade doctors to prescribe it. New antibiotics face the opposite logic. Every time an antibiotic is used, the bacteria it targets get another chance to evolve resistance, so the most valuable new antibiotics are precisely the ones doctors try hardest not to use.
This creates an awkward problem for the companies that develop them. Bringing a new antibiotic to market takes many years and a large investment, much like any other drug. But once approved, a promising compound is often kept in reserve as a last line of defence, prescribed only when older drugs have failed. Sales remain modest for years, sometimes for the entire life of the patent. Several small firms that succeeded scientifically have nevertheless gone out of business, and large firms have, one after another, quietly left the field.
Meanwhile, resistance continues to spread. Infections that were once cleared with a short course of tablets now sometimes require hospital stays and intravenous treatment, and a growing number resist almost everything doctors have. Routine operations, cancer chemotherapy and the care of premature babies all depend on the assumption that infections can be controlled. If that assumption FALTERS, much of modern medicine becomes far riskier.
Economists have proposed a number of remedies, which broadly fall into two groups. Push incentives reduce the cost of research by funding early-stage work through grants. Pull incentives reward success instead: a government might, for example, pay a company a fixed annual fee for access to a new antibiotic, regardless of how many doses are actually used. Such subscription-style payments break the link between profit and volume, which is exactly the link that makes antibiotics unattractive in the first place.
Critics worry that pull incentives could become costly giveaways if the rewards are not tied to genuine medical need. A company might be paid handsomely for a drug that adds little to what already exists. Designing the criteria carefully is therefore crucial: rewards should be highest for drugs that work against the most dangerous resistant bacteria, and contracts should require responsible use and fair global access.
None of these measures can succeed in isolation. Better hygiene, faster diagnosis and more (____) prescribing reduce the pressure on existing drugs and buy time for new ones. Antibiotics, in a sense, are a shared resource whose value is ERODED each time they are misused. Protecting that resource will require treating it less like an ordinary product and more like public infrastructure.
Q1.According to the passage, how does the market logic for new antibiotics differ from that for most other medicines?
- Antibiotics are cheaper to develop than other medicines
- Antibiotics are prescribed more widely than any other drug
- Doctors refuse to prescribe antibiotics under any condition
- The most valuable new antibiotics are the ones doctors try hardest not to use, so wide use does not drive their success
- Antibiotics do not need approval before being sold
Q2.Why have several small firms gone out of business despite scientific success?
- Their antibiotics were found to be unsafe
- Their new antibiotics were kept in reserve, so sales remained modest for years
- Governments banned the sale of new antibiotics
- Large firms copied their drugs illegally
- They spent too little on research
Q3.What does the assumption mentioned in the third paragraph refer to?
- That infections can be controlled
- That antibiotics are cheap to produce
- That resistance will stop spreading on its own
- That hospitals can treat every patient
- That new antibiotics will always be profitable