Social Science (087) — AI-generated practice question

By 1921, Gandhiji designed the Swaraj flag — a tricolour (red, green and white) with a spinning wheel at its centre. The spinning wheel represented the Gandhian ideal of self-help: it symbolised productive labour, economic self-reliance, and the Swadeshi spirit of making one's own cloth rather than buying British goods.

A weapon would have implied violence, which contradicted Gandhi's principle of non-violence. A crown would have represented monarchy and authority — the very colonial power Indians were resisting. The spinning wheel, by contrast, united all Indians as common people engaged in dignified labour, making it a powerful symbol of peaceful defiance and national solidarity.

Source: Chapter 2, Section 4 – The Sense of Collective Belonging

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• The textbook explicitly states the spinning wheel represented "the Gandhian ideal of self-help" — use this exact phrase.
• The second part (why not a weapon/crown) is not directly in the passage, so use logical inference from context: Gandhi's non-violence + anti-colonial struggle = weapons and crowns are inappropriate.
• Examiners award marks for: (1) identifying the symbol, (2) its meaning from the text, (3) a reasonable contrast with alternatives.
• Don't over-explain; 3 marks = 3 clear points in ~75 words.