26 November 2025 · Shift 1

Delhi Sultanate: market control Alauddin Khalji (1296-1316) is famous for his market control or price control regulations. He fixed the prices of grain, cloth, horses, cattle and slaves and ran three separate markets in Delhi - the Mandi for grain, the Sarai-i-Adl for cloth and manufactured goods, and a market for horses, cattle and slaves - policed by the Shahna-i-Mandi, so that he could pay a huge standing army in cash at low rates. Balban is remembered for his 'blood and iron' policy and the court rituals of Sijda and Paibos; Iltutmish organised the Iqta system and issued the silver Tanka and copper Jital; Muhammad bin Tughlaq created the Diwan-i-Kohi for farming - none of them for market control. So option (c) is correct.

Sources of the Constitution The advisory jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, given by Article 143, is borrowed from the Canadian Constitution: the President may refer any question of law or of public importance to the Court for its opinion, and that opinion is advisory, not binding. Other borrowings from Canada are a federation with a strong Centre, residuary powers vested in the Centre, and the appointment of State Governors by the Centre. Rule of law comes from the British Constitution and the Fundamental Duties from the Constitution of the erstwhile USSR; the detailed federal structure with its three lists was taken mainly from the Government of India Act, 1935. So option (c) is correct.

Article 25: freedom of religion Article 25 gives every person freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion, subject to public order, morality, health and the other Fundamental Rights. 'Propagate' means to spread and explain one's own faith. In Rev. Stainislaus v. State of Madhya Pradesh (1977) the Supreme Court held that it does not carry a right to convert another person, because such conversion would impinge on that person's own freedom of conscience. So a right to religious conversion is the one thing Article 25 does not contain; the affairs and institutions of religious denominations are separately protected by Article 26, which is read as part of the same group of religious freedoms. So option (c) is correct.

Headquarters of AIIB The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has its headquarters in Beijing, China. Proposed by China in 2013, it began operations in January 2016 as a multilateral development bank that finances sustainable infrastructure in Asia; India is a founding member and, after China, its largest shareholder, and is also the largest borrower from the bank. Seoul houses the Global Green Growth Institute and Jakarta the ASEAN Secretariat, while Singapore is only a member of the AIIB. So option (a) is correct.

India-Japan nuclear agreement India and Japan signed the Agreement for Cooperation in the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy on 11 November 2016 at Tokyo, during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Japan. It was a landmark because Japan, the only country to have suffered atomic bombing, signed such a pact with a country that has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; the agreement came into force in July 2017. It allows Japanese companies to supply reactors, components and technology for India's civil nuclear power programme, and follows similar civil nuclear deals India signed with the USA (2008), France, Russia, Canada and Australia. So option (c) is correct.

Indian classical instruments Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia is the best known modern master of the bansuri, the Indian bamboo flute, and his name is always linked with that instrument. Born at Allahabad in 1938, he trained under Annapurna Devi and carried the bansuri from folk music to the concert platform; he received the Padma Bhushan in 1992 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2000. The other three instruments belong to other masters, so each option can be ruled out by naming its own artist. Hence option (b) is correct.

Government scheme and ministry The Deen Dayal SPARSH Yojana is run by the Department of Posts, and the Department of Posts works under the Ministry of Communications. SPARSH stands for Scholarship for Promotion of Aptitude and Research in Stamps as a Hobby, so the scheme is a philately scholarship, which fits the postal department exactly. A student of Classes VI to IX with a good academic record and membership of the school Philately Club is selected through a philately quiz and a project, and gets ₹6,000 a year, paid at ₹500 a month. Hence option (b) is correct.

International reports The Global Terrorism Index is compiled and released every year by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), a think tank with its head office at Sydney, Australia. The same institute brings out the Global Peace Index as well, so IEP is the name to remember for both peace and terrorism rankings; the index scores countries on incidents, deaths, injuries and hostages over the past five years. SIPRI reports on arms and military spending, Amnesty International on human rights, and the World Economic Forum on global risks and the gender gap, so none of them publishes this index. Hence option (b) is correct.

Human Development Report The Human Development Report has been published every year since 1990 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which has its headquarters at New York. It was conceived by the economist Mahbub ul Haq with Amartya Sen, and it carries the Human Development Index, which combines life expectancy, education and gross national income per head. The WHO brings out the World Health Statistics, UNESCO the Global Education Monitoring Report and the OECD the PISA results, so none of them is the publisher asked for. Hence option (a) is correct.

State Health Index The State Health Index, published as 'Healthy States, Progressive India', is prepared by NITI Aayog with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, and the technical assistance for it comes from the World Bank. States and Union Territories are ranked on 24 indicators grouped in three domains — Health Outcomes, which carries the largest weight, Governance and Information, and Key Inputs and Processes. Each unit gets two scores, one for the level of performance in the reference year and one for the improvement over the previous year, so a poorer State can still rank high on incremental performance. In the round for 2019-20, Kerala led the Larger States, Mizoram the Smaller States and Uttar Pradesh recorded the best incremental performance. Hence option (a) is correct.

History of steeplechase The steeplechase began as a cross-country horse race in which riders galloped from one church steeple to the next, clearing whatever hedges and streams lay between; that is where the name comes from. It was turned into a running event on a track in England around 1850, when Oxford University held such a race, and the natural obstacles became fixed barriers and a water jump. The modern race is 3,000 m with 28 barriers and 7 water jumps; it entered the Olympics for men at Antwerp in 1920 and for women at Beijing in 2008. The early 1600s, the late nineteenth century and the mid twentieth century are all too early or too late for the first track steeplechase. Hence option (a) is correct.

River projects of India The Farakka Barrage is built across the Ganga in the Murshidabad district of West Bengal, a little above the point where the river splits into the Padma and the Bhagirathi-Hooghly. Built between 1961 and 1975, it diverts part of the flow into the Bhagirathi-Hooghly through a feeder canal so that silt is flushed out of the Kolkata port; the sharing of this water is governed by the Indo-Bangladesh Ganga Water Treaty of 1996. The Yamuna carries the Hathnikund and Okhla barrages, the Narmada the Sardar Sarovar dam and the Tapi the Ukai dam, so none of them is the river of Farakka. Hence option (a) is correct.

Olympic host cities The International Olympic Committee awarded the 2032 Summer Olympics to Brisbane, Australia, in July 2021. It will be Australia's third Summer Games, after Melbourne in 1956 and Sydney in 2000. Tokyo's turn was 2020, held in 2021 because of the pandemic, Paris hosted in 2024 and Los Angeles hosts in 2028, so none of these belongs to 2032. Hence option (a) is correct.

Uses of remote sensing A remote sensing satellite records the radiation reflected and emitted by the ground, so it can read the condition of soil and vegetation over very large areas and repeat the reading every few days. Statement I is right: indices such as the NDVI show when a crop is under water stress, and satellite data on soil moisture and rainfall confirm a developing drought long before a field survey can. Statement II is right as well: the satellite measures the area actually sown and the vigour of the standing crop, which is how the FASAL programme forecasts the wheat, rice and cotton harvest before it is cut. Both applications are therefore valid. Hence option (c) is correct.

Mars Orbiter Mission The Mars Orbiter Mission, Mangalyaan, was launched on 5 November 2013 from Sriharikota by PSLV-C25, the XL version of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. The PSLV could not throw the spacecraft straight towards Mars, so the orbiter was first parked in an elliptical earth orbit and its apogee was raised step by step before the trans-Mars injection; it entered Mars orbit on 24 September 2014. India thus became the first country to reach Mars at its very first attempt and the fourth agency to reach it, after Roscosmos, NASA and ESA, at a cost of about ₹450 crore. The GSLV Mk III was not yet operational in 2013, the ASLV was retired in 1994 and the SSLV first flew only in 2022, so none of them could have carried the mission. Hence option (a) is correct.

Chandrayaan-2 launch vehicle Chandrayaan-2 was launched on 22 July 2019 from the Second Launch Pad at Sriharikota by GSLV Mk III-M1, the heavy-lift vehicle now renamed LVM3. The spacecraft weighed about 3,850 kg, far beyond what the PSLV can lift to a lunar transfer path, so India's most powerful rocket had to be used. The mission carried an Orbiter, the lander Vikram and the rover Pragyan; the lander crash-landed on 7 September 2019, but the orbiter is still working and it later helped Chandrayaan-3. Chandrayaan-1 had gone up on PSLV-C11 in 2008, while SLV-3 and ASLV were small early vehicles retired long before, so only the GSLV fits. Hence option (a) is correct.

Aerogel for e-waste gold In December 2024 a team at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, led by Prof. Sujit K. Ghosh, reported a hybrid aerogel named IPcomp-9 that pulls gold out of electronic waste. An aerogel is an extremely light porous solid; this one is a composite of a metal-organic polyhedron and a covalent organic framework, so it offers a very large surface for the gold ions to stick to. It works in two steps — it first adsorbs the gold ions from the leached e-waste solution and then reduces them to solid metallic gold, which can simply be collected. The material is highly selective, so gold is picked up even from a mixture of other metal ions, and it can be reused; that makes urban mining of e-waste cheaper and far less polluting than cyanide leaching. Hence option (a) is correct.

PUNCH solar mission PUNCH — Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere — is a NASA mission, launched on 11 March 2025 on a Falcon 9 along with the SPHEREx telescope. Its four small satellites fly in a Sun-synchronous orbit and work as a single instrument, photographing the Sun's corona and the young solar wind in polarised light to show how the corona turns into the wind that reaches the Earth. India's solar mission is Aditya-L1 (2023), the ESA runs Solar Orbiter and Proba-3, and China has ASO-S or Kuafu-1, so none of the other agencies owns PUNCH. Hence option (a) is correct.

States of matter Whether a substance is a solid, a liquid or a gas depends on the tug of war between the intermolecular forces that hold its particles together and the kinetic energy that drives them apart, and the two conditions that control this balance are temperature and pressure. Raising the temperature adds kinetic energy, so a solid melts and a liquid boils; raising the pressure pushes the particles closer, so a gas can be liquefied — this is why LPG is a gas in the open but a liquid inside the cylinder. Density, mass, volume, weight and viscosity are properties that follow from the state a substance is already in; they do not decide that state. Hence option (a) is correct.

Jantar Mantar observatories Sawai Jai Singh II of Amber, the founder of Jaipur, built five masonry observatories called Jantar Mantar between 1724 and 1735. He found the small brass instruments of his day too imprecise, so he raised huge stone instruments such as the Samrat Yantra, a sundial that reads time to about two seconds. Of the five, the one at Mathura no longer survives, and the Jaipur observatory, the largest and best preserved, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2010. Hence option (a) is correct.

Robert Clive Robert Clive, the victor of Plassey in 1757 and twice Governor of Bengal, took his own life in London in 1774, and that is the unfortunate event the question points to. He had returned home enormously rich; Parliament cross-examined him in 1772-73 about the fortune he had made in Bengal, and although the House finally resolved that he had rendered great and meritorious services to the country, the ordeal, his illness and his opium habit told on him. He was therefore neither imprisoned nor exiled nor executed — the censure motion moved against him was actually defeated. Hence option (a) is correct.

Passage of a Bill An ordinary Bill passes through three readings in each House, and the debate on whether the Bill, as introduced or as amended, should be passed belongs to the third reading. At this last stage no fresh amendment of substance is allowed; members may only speak for or against the Bill as a whole, and it is declared passed if a majority of those present and voting support it. The first reading is merely the introduction of the Bill with its title, and the second reading is the stage of general discussion, reference to a committee and clause-by-clause consideration; there is no fourth reading at all. Hence option (a) is correct.

Pancreatic enzymes Bile from the liver first emulsifies fat into tiny droplets; the enzyme that then digests those droplets is pancreatic lipase, also called steapsin, which reaches the duodenum in the pancreatic juice. Lipase splits triglycerides into fatty acids and glycerol, and these are absorbed by the lacteals of the intestinal villi. It needs an alkaline medium, supplied by the bicarbonate of the pancreatic juice, which neutralises the acidic chyme coming from the stomach. Amylase acts on starch, pepsin is a protein-digesting enzyme of the stomach and not of the pancreas, and maltase acts on maltose, so none of them digests fat. Hence option (a) is correct.

Plant waste in xylem A plant has no excretory organ, so it stores many waste products inside tissues it no longer needs; the old xylem at the centre of a woody stem, the heartwood, has stopped carrying water and is used as exactly such a store. Both statements name real deposits: resins (I) and gums (II) are organic waste products laid down in old xylem, along with tannins, oils and crystals. These deposits darken the heartwood and make it hard, heavy and resistant to decay and insects, which is why heartwood gives the durable timber. Since neither statement is false, the options that accept only one of them, or reject both, cannot be right. Hence option (a) is correct.

Sangam age In Tamil tradition a Sangam was an academy or assembly of poets that met under the patronage of the Pandya kings of Madurai, so the word stands for an assembly of Tamil poets. Three such Sangams are named; from the third comes almost all the literature that survives, the eight anthologies called Ettuthogai and the ten idylls called Pattuppattu. Sangam poetry divides the Tamil country into five eco-zones — Kurinji the hills, Mullai the forest and pasture, Marutam the farmland, Neytal the coast and Palai the dry land — and each zone carries its own mood of love. Hence option (a) is correct.