27 November 2025 · Shift 2

Delhi Sultanate rulers Razia Sultana ruled from 1236 to 1240 A.D. and remains the only woman ever to sit on the throne of the Delhi Sultanate. She was the daughter of Iltutmish of the Slave (Mamluk) dynasty, who chose her as his successor in preference to his own sons. She gave up the veil, held open court and appointed officers on merit, which the Turkish nobility (the Chalisa) resented; she was deposed and killed in 1240. Nur Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal were Mughal empresses, and Begum Hazrat Mahal led the Awadh resistance in the Revolt of 1857, so none of them ruled the Sultanate. Hence the correct option is (b).

Bhakti movement saints The Bhakti tradition of the Tamil country traditionally recognises 12 Alvar saints, the devotees of Lord Vishnu, who flourished between about the 6th and 9th centuries A.D. Their Tamil hymns, called Pasurams, were collected by Nathamuni as the Nalayira Divya Prabandham, the 'four thousand divine verses' that became a core text of Sri Vaishnavism. Andal was the only woman among the twelve, and Nammalvar is regarded as the greatest of them. The parallel group of Shaiva saints, the Nayanars, numbered 63, so the figure that belongs to the Alvars is 12. Hence the correct option is (b).

Fundamental Rights Article 30 gives every minority, whether based on religion or on language, the right to establish and administer educational institutions of its own choice. It belongs to the Cultural and Educational Rights (Articles 29 and 30) inside Part III of the Constitution, and the State may not discriminate against such institutions while granting aid. Article 29 protects the distinct language, script and culture of any section of citizens; Article 26 is the freedom to manage religious affairs; Article 21A makes free and compulsory education for children aged 6 to 14 a right; Article 32 is the right to constitutional remedies. Hence the correct option is (c).

International organisations Sanjiv Ranjan, a 1993-batch Indian Foreign Service officer, took charge as Secretary-General of the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) on 1 January 2025. IORA was founded in 1997 and works for economic cooperation, maritime safety, trade and disaster management among the countries of the Indian Ocean rim; its secretariat is at Ebene in Mauritius. It began with 14 founding members, including India, and has since grown to 23 member states with several dialogue partners. BIMSTEC has its secretariat in Dhaka and the SCO in Beijing, while the G20 has no permanent secretariat at all, so none of them fits. Hence the correct option is (a).

Sports personalities The title 'Flying Sikh' belongs to the sprinter Milkha Singh, India's finest quarter-miler. He won gold in the 400 m at the Asian Games of 1958 and 1962 and gold in the 440 yards at the 1958 Commonwealth Games, India's first athletics gold there. At the 1960 Rome Olympics he finished fourth in the 400 m final, missing a medal by a whisker but setting a national record that stood for close to forty years. The name is said to have been given to him by General Ayub Khan of Pakistan after he beat Abdul Khaliq in Lahore. Hence the correct option is (b).

DRDO leadership In May 2025 the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet gave Dr. Samir V. Kamat a further one-year extension as Secretary, Department of Defence Research and Development and Chairman, DRDO, covering 1 June 2025 to 31 May 2026. A metallurgical engineer from IIT Kharagpur with a doctorate from Ohio State University, he had taken charge of the dual post on 25 August 2022 after heading DRDO's Naval Systems and Materials cluster. DRDO itself dates from 1958, when the Defence Science Organisation was merged with the Technical Development Establishments of the Army; its headquarters is DRDO Bhawan, New Delhi. The other three names are earlier Chairmen, not the officer whose tenure was extended in 2025. Hence option (c) is correct.

Union Budget 2025-26 The Union Budget 2025-26 announced a Maritime Development Fund with a corpus of ₹25,000 crore, to be raised and spent over ten years. The Centre will put in up to 49% of the corpus and the balance is to come from ports and the private sector, the fund giving long-tenure, low-cost finance to shipbuilding, ports and shipping. It was announced along with a revamped Shipbuilding Financial Assistance Policy, shipbuilding clusters and the extension of the tonnage tax scheme to inland vessels, the aim being to lift India's share in global shipbuilding. Hence option (b) is correct.

International indices The Multidimensional Vulnerability Index (MVI) is a United Nations index; it was drawn up by a High-Level Panel set up by the UN Secretary-General, serviced by UN-OHRLLS, and was endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 2024. It scores a country on structural vulnerability and lack of resilience - economic, environmental and social - so that concessional finance can reach Small Island Developing States and other fragile economies whose need per-capita income alone hides. The other bodies publish different products: the World Economic Forum brings out the Global Gender Gap and Global Risks reports, the OECD the Better Life Index, and the Asian Development Bank its regional outlooks. Hence option (a) is correct.

Carbon capture by NTPC NTPC set up the world's first plant of its kind, which converts carbon dioxide captured from flue gas into methanol, at the Vindhyachal Super Thermal Power Station in Singrauli district of Madhya Pradesh. Vindhyachal, rated at 4,760 MW, is the largest thermal power station in India, so it offers the steadiest stream of $C{O}_2$ for such a unit. The plant is a Carbon Capture and Utilisation (CCU) demonstration: instead of only storing the gas underground, it turns a greenhouse gas into methanol, a clean fuel and chemical feedstock. It was dedicated in November 2024, on NTPC's Raising Day. Hence option (a) is correct.

Books and authors 'Capitalism: A Ghost Story' (2014) is a book-length essay by Arundhati Roy on corporate power, big philanthropy and inequality in India. Roy won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel 'The God of Small Things'; her other works include 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness', 'The Algebra of Infinite Justice' and 'Walking with the Comrades'. Hence option (b) is correct.

Books and authors 'Shalimar the Clown' (2005) is a novel by Salman Rushdie, set largely in Kashmir; it follows the village performer Shalimar as betrayal in love and the militancy in the valley turn him into an assassin. Rushdie won the Booker Prize in 1981 for 'Midnight's Children'; his other well-known books are 'The Satanic Verses', 'The Moor's Last Sigh' and the memoir 'Joseph Anton'. Hence option (c) is correct.

Harappan town planning Harappan builders used kiln-burnt mud-bricks cut to a fixed proportion, length : breadth : thickness in the ratio 4:2:1. The same proportion, and often the very same sizes, are found at Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Kalibangan and Lothal - hundreds of kilometres apart - which is why the civilisation is treated as the earliest example of standardised, planned building. Burnt bricks were chosen because they resist water, so they could be used for drains, wells, bathing platforms and the Great Bath; sun-dried mud bricks were kept for embankments and filling. Timber, bamboo and marble appear only in small or later contexts and were never standardised in this way. Hence option (a) is correct.

Festivals of India Veerampattinam is a coastal fishing village about 8 km south of Puducherry town, and the car festival of its Sengazhuneer Amman temple is the largest local festival of that Union Territory. Held in the Tamil month of Aadi (July-August), the temple car is drawn by thousands of devotees along the shore, and it is the one chariot festival of the region that is taken right up to the sea. The fishing community takes the lead in pulling the car and prays for a safe sea and a good catch, which is why the festival is so closely tied to the coast. Hence option (b) is correct.

ISRO launch vehicles GSLV stands for Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle, the ISRO rocket built to place heavy communication satellites in Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO). A geosynchronous orbit has a period of about 24 hours, equal to the earth's rotation, so the satellite keeps returning over the same longitude - exactly what a fixed dish antenna on the ground needs. GSLV Mk-II flies with an indigenous cryogenic upper stage; the heavier LVM3 carried Chandrayaan-2 and Chandrayaan-3, while the PSLV is used for polar and sun-synchronous orbits. Hence option (a) is correct.

Buoyancy and Archimedes By Archimedes' principle the buoyant force equals the weight of the fluid displaced, so $F_B=\rho Vg$, where $\rho$ is the density of the fluid, V the volume of the body immersed and g the acceleration due to gravity. The only property of the fluid in that formula is $\rho$: a denser fluid displaced by the same volume weighs more and therefore pushes up harder. That is why a ship floats higher in sea water than in river water, and why an iron nail sinks in water but floats in mercury. Colour and refractive index are optical properties, and pressure only varies with depth because of the density, so none of them is the deciding factor. Hence option (b) is correct.

Rise of the Sikhs At the Sarbat Khalsa held at Amritsar on Baisakhi in 1748, the scattered Sikh jathas were reorganised, on Nawab Kapur Singh's proposal, into one confederate army called the Dal Khalsa, with Jassa Singh Ahluwalia as its supreme commander. The Dal Khalsa was divided into twelve misls, each holding its own territory under its own sardar but bound to fight together, chiefly against the invasions of Ahmad Shah Abdali. Decisions were taken collectively by the Sarbat Khalsa through a gurmata passed at the Akal Takht, which made it a political as well as a military body. The misl system lasted until Ranjit Singh welded the misls into the Sikh Empire from 1799. Hence option (b) is correct.

National income aggregates Personal Disposable Income is what households are left with once the compulsory claims on personal income are met. $\mathrm{Personal}\mathrm{Disposable}\mathrm{Income}=\mathrm{Personal}\mathrm{Income}-\mathrm{direct}\mathrm{personal}\mathrm{taxes}-\mathrm{non}-\mathrm{tax}\mathrm{payments}\mathrm{to}\mathrm{government}$ This is the income a household can actually divide between consumption and saving, so it is the base of the consumption function and of the household saving rate. Corporations, the government and financial institutions are producing or intermediating units; profits and revenue reaching them are not 'personal' income, so none of them fits the definition. Hence option (a) is correct.

Revolt of 1857 Tantia Tope (Ramchandra Panduranga Tope) was the chief military commander of Nana Saheb, the adopted son of the last Peshwa Baji Rao II, who led the revolt at Kanpur from June 1857. After Kanpur was lost he moved with his troops towards Jhansi and Kalpi, and in June 1858 he joined Rani Lakshmibai in the capture of Gwalior - so he fought alongside her, but served under Nana Saheb. He carried on a guerrilla campaign in central India until he was betrayed, captured and executed at Shivpuri in April 1859. Hence option (a) is correct.

Export-Oriented Units Under the Export-Oriented Unit scheme, in force since 1981 and now covered by the Foreign Trade Policy, a project needs a minimum investment of ₹1 crore in plant and machinery before it can be approved as an EOU. The floor is waived for units in software technology parks, electronics hardware technology parks and biotechnology parks, and for handicrafts, agriculture, floriculture, aquaculture, animal husbandry, IT and services units. An EOU may be set up anywhere in the country, unlike a SEZ unit which must be inside the notified zone; in return it exports its entire production and gets duty-free import of inputs and capital goods. Hence option (c) is correct.

Governor's assent to Bills Article 200 deals with a Bill that has been passed by the Legislature of a State: it is presented to the Governor, who may give assent, withhold assent, return the Bill (if it is not a Money Bill) for reconsideration, or reserve it for the consideration of the President. If the House passes the returned Bill again, with or without amendment, the Governor is bound to give assent - so the return is a delaying power, not a veto. Article 201 takes over only after a Bill is reserved, and Articles 202 and 204 are about the State budget and appropriation, not about assent. Hence option (c) is correct.

Major ports of India Marmagao (Mormugao) Port stands on the headland at the mouth of the Zuari estuary in Goa, on the Arabian Sea coast; the Zuari and the Mandovi are Goa's two main rivers. It is a natural harbour sheltered by a breakwater, developed by the Portuguese from 1885, and for decades it was India's leading iron-ore exporting port, fed by rail from the Goa-Karnataka ore belt. The other options lie elsewhere: Kochi is on the Vembanad backwaters, Chennai is an artificial harbour on the Coromandel coast, and Visakhapatnam is a landlocked natural harbour on the east coast. Hence option (b) is correct.

Five-Year Plans The Ninth Five-Year Plan ran from 1997 to 2002 and was launched in the fiftieth year of Independence, with the theme 'Growth with Social Justice and Equity'. It aimed at about 6.5% annual growth and achieved close to 5.4%, and it put the seven Basic Minimum Services - safe drinking water, primary health, primary education, housing, nutrition, connectivity and the public distribution system - at the centre of planning. It also came after the two-year plan holiday of 1990-92, which is why the Eighth Plan began only in 1992 and the Ninth in 1997. Hence option (c) is correct.

CAM photosynthesis Desert plants follow Crassulacean Acid Metabolism (CAM): their stomata stay shut through the hot day and open only at night, so carbon dioxide can be taken in only after dark. The $C{O}_2$ absorbed at night is fixed by the enzyme PEP carboxylase into oxaloacetate and stored in the vacuole as malic acid. By day the malic acid is broken down and the $C{O}_2$ released inside the leaf enters the Calvin cycle, so photosynthesis goes on with the stomata still closed. Separating gas exchange (night) from photosynthesis (day) is what saves water and lets cactus, Opuntia, Agave and pineapple survive arid heat. So statement II alone is true, and option (b) is correct.

Parts of the brain The cerebellum - the 'little brain' lying behind the pons and below the back of the cerebrum - coordinates precise voluntary movement and maintains posture and equilibrium. It compares the movement ordered by the motor cortex with the actual position reported by the muscles, joints and the inner ear, and corrects the difference, which is why its damage causes a staggering gait and loss of balance rather than paralysis. The frontal lobe initiates voluntary movement and handles reasoning, the temporal lobe deals with hearing and memory, and the pons is mainly a relay between the medulla and the cerebellum. Hence option (b) is correct.

Gupta empire Samudragupta (c. 335-375 CE) marked his conquests by performing the Ashvamedha, the horse sacrifice by which a ruler claimed paramount sovereignty. The proof is his special Ashvamedha-type gold coins showing the horse before the sacrificial post, and the Gupta records that call him the restorer of the horse sacrifice 'long in abeyance'. In the rite a horse was let loose for a year with the army following it, and every ruler whose land it entered had to submit or fight - so the sacrifice was a public statement of the conquests that had gone before it. Rajasuya was the royal consecration, Vajapeya a chariot-race rite of renewal, and Soma yajna the general class of soma offerings; none of these was the victory sacrifice. Hence option (d) is correct.