Question

Read the following passage and answer the question below.

The greens' success has clear policy implications, especially on issues of nuclear power, ecological tax reform, and citizenship rights. But success also has implications for parties themselves. Greens have always faced a unique 'strategic conundrum' arising from their unique beliefs and movement roots. Put simply, how can they reconcile their radical alternative politics with participation in mainstream or 'grey' parliamentary and government structures? Throughout the 1990s most parties shed their radical cloth in an attempt to capture votes, even at the expense of party unity and purity. Most were rewarded with electoral success well beyond what had been imaginable in the 1980s. The price to pay has been tortured internal debates about strategy, and new questions about green party identity and purpose. Today the key questions facing green parties revolve around not whether to embrace power, but what to do with it. More specifically, green parties face three new challenges in the new millennium: first, how to carve out a policy niche as established parties and governments become wiser to green demands, and as green concerns themselves appear more mainstream. Second, how to make green ideas spread beyond the confines of rich industrialised states into Eastern Europe and the developing world, where green parties remain marginal and environmental problems acute. Third, how to ensure that the broader role of green parties, as consciousness raisers, agitators, conscience of parliament and politics, is not sacrificed on the altar of electoral success. Green parties have come a long way since their emergence and development in the 1970s and 1980s. They have become established players able to shape party competition, government formation, and government policy. But this very 'establishment' carries risk for a party whose core values and identities depend mightily on their ability to challenge the conventional order, to agitate and to annoy. For most green parties, the greatest fear is not electoral decline so much as the prospect of becoming a party with parliamentary platform, ministerial voice, but nothing to say.

Question: Which out of the following is closest in meaning to the first three challenges mentioned in the paragraph?

• A. Niche of green parties is being eroded by mainstream parties.
• B. Green parties are finding it difficult to find new strategy.
• C. Green parties have become stronger over a period of time.
• D. Some green parties are becoming grey.

Hint:

Look for the option that captures the shared thread across all three challenges: a shrinking, distinct space for green parties.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is A

The passage lists three new challenges facing green parties in the new millennium. The first is carving out a policy niche as mainstream parties and governments grow wiser to green demands and green issues start to look mainstream themselves. The second is spreading green ideas into Eastern Europe and the developing world, where green parties stay marginal. The third is protecting the party's role as an agitator and conscience of politics without losing that role to electoral success. Read together, all three describe the same underlying problem: the space that once belonged only to green parties is shrinking because mainstream forces are moving into it.

1. Niche of green parties is being eroded by mainstream parties: this is the one idea common to all three challenges. Established parties absorbing green demands, developing regions staying outside the green fold, and electoral success diluting the party's distinct voice are all forms of the same squeeze on the green niche from the mainstream.
2. Green parties are finding it difficult to find new strategy: the passage does mention tortured internal debates about strategy, but this describes how the party dealt with past success in the 1990s, not the three challenges being asked about here.
3. Green parties have become stronger over a period of time: the passage notes past electoral gains, but the three challenges are about pressures the parties face now, not a claim that they have simply grown stronger.
4. Some green parties are becoming grey: this idea appears earlier in the passage, about joining mainstream or grey parliamentary structures, which describes the tension of holding power, not a summary of the three specific challenges listed afterward.

The three challenges are all versions of mainstream parties and structures crowding out the distinct space green parties once held, so the closest match is that their niche is being eroded by the mainstream.