Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 3...

Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 31 to 40.

        Calls to treat compute as a public utility signal the strategic return of the state, not least through industrial policies like the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act and the EU’s Net-Zero Industry Act. In AI, compute – the capacity to train and serve large models – has become the decisive lever. The UK’s £900m AI Research Resource (AIRR) is framed as world-class infrastructure to widen access and seed public-interest innovation. [I] Yet if access remains scarce and extractive, such investment could merely gild existing hierarchies instead of redressing them.

        AI relies on an interlaced stack: chips and data-center infrastructure, orchestration software, model development and hosting, then downstream applications. Where this stack is vertically integrated or steered by venture-capital imperatives, frontier research narrows, and “open” projects become dependent on hyperscalers’ platforms and purse strings. Partnerships that canalize public research into private clouds risk entrenching monopoly control over experimentation, evaluation, and deployment. [II] The upshot is a compute divide that attenuates academic participation and sidelines smaller firms with socially valuable but less lucrative aims.

        On present trajectories, the gulf between researchers’ needs and domestically available capacity will widen, especially where public provision is thin. Governments can procure cloud credits as an interim fix while seeding on-shore capacity and “friend-shoring” resilient supply chains. [III] Relying on hyperscalers to fulfil short-term demand, while deferring public capacity-building, risks deepening structural dependency. Without credible plans for governance, efficiency, and sustainability, procurement becomes a subsidy to incumbents rather than a pathway to plural, equitable research ecosystems.

        Public compute should be governed to create public value: user-centric boards; safety, auditing, and documentation duties; contributions to digital commons; and efficiency commitments that reward doing more with less compute. Treating major compute providers as utilities – ensuring fair dealing and interoperability – would curb lock-in and enhance contestability. [IV] To move beyond an arms race narrative, policymakers must define public benefit precisely, then align access rules, funding, and oversight with that vision so that AI serves society rather than merely scale.

(Adapted from Ada Lovelace Institute, “The role of public compute”.)

Question 31. The word gulf in paragraph 3 mostly means ______.

A. roughly equivalent                                B. marginally divergent

C. vastly asymmetrical                                D. neatly congruent