Disclaimer: NTA forgot to print the passage for Questions 23–25 in the candidate response sheet. We reverse-engineered the passage based on student memory, so the passage below is not the original NTA text.
Nature is often described through opposites: stability and change, order and disorder, construction and decay. Yet these pairs are less like enemies than like terms in a single account. A crystal appears orderly because its particles occupy constrained positions, while the surrounding world carries the energetic cost of producing and maintaining that arrangement. In this sense, order and disorder are not independent quantities that simply rise and fall in isolation; they are relational. Local order can increase, provided that a greater increase of disorder occurs elsewhere.
The evolution of human beings on Earth offers a striking illustration. Over immense periods, biological organisation became more elaborate: cells combined into tissues, nervous systems coordinated specialised organs, and eventually human societies built languages, institutions and technologies capable of storing information outside the body. None of this suspended the physical tendency toward disorder. Organisms maintain their intricate structures by consuming concentrated energy and releasing heat and waste. A city, similarly, may look like an island of organised activity only because flows of fuel, food and materials enter it and dispersed energy and refuse leave it.
The contrast, then, is real but not absolute. Nature contains both order and disorder, but each becomes intelligible only in relation to the other. The more sharply a system creates and preserves order within a boundary, the more carefully one must ask where the accompanying disorder has been displaced. This is why an increase in order does not refute the growth of disorder; under ordinary physical conditions it depends upon it. The apparent paradox disappears once the scale of observation is widened. Human organisation, biological complexity and technological sophistication are examples not of order defeating disorder, but of local order being purchased by a larger dispersal elsewhere.
