Direction: Read the passage given below and answer the questions by choosing the correct/most appropriate options:

Sad indeed is the lot of the lone pioneer who swims against the current of apathy, ignorance and hostility of his times. The fact that posterity often understands him better and honours him is of no consequence during his lifetime. Socrates paid the ultimate price for his convictions but is today ranked among the all-time great thinkers. Even in a technical subject like science one cannot forget the ordeal that Galileo went through. His predecessor, Nicolaus Copernicus, was smarter for not revealing his theory of the solar system until he was on his death-bed! Somewhat better, but still bitter, was the fate of Charles Babbage, the 19" century English mathematician, who with amazing insight thought up all the essential features of the modern computer and laboured prodigiously during his lifetime to turn them into reality. Sadly, all his efforts came to a naught in practice and only drew derision from his contemporaries. His name went into oblivion till the development of modern computers made scientists realise how prescient Babbage had been.

It has been the dream of mankind to make machines do the laborious, uninteresting but necessary mathematical calculations involved in commerce, finance, census, etc. The earliest such device was the abacus, invented 2,500 years ago and which is still widely in use in the Far East. The invention of the logarithm and the slide rule was the next major step several centuries later. In the 17th century, Blaise Pascal and Leibnitz developed the first mechanical adding machines using gear wheels. Then Charles Babbage came on the scene.