28 November 2025 · Shift 1

National days National Unity Day, or Rashtriya Ekta Diwas, is observed on 31 October, the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. It was instituted by the Government of India in 2014 to honour the 'Iron Man of India', who as the first Home Minister merged more than 560 princely states into the Union. The 'Run for Unity' and the national unity pledge mark the day, and the Statue of Unity at Kevadia in Gujarat, unveiled on 31 October 2018, is dedicated to him. The other three names are not observances of the Government of India, so option (c) is the correct answer.

RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra took charge as the 26th Governor of the Reserve Bank of India on 11 December 2024, succeeding Shaktikanta Das. He is a 1990-batch IAS officer of the Rajasthan cadre and was Revenue Secretary in the Ministry of Finance immediately before the appointment. Raghuram Rajan (2013-16) and Urjit Patel (2016-18) were earlier Governors, while Viral Acharya served only as a Deputy Governor. So option (d) is the correct answer.

Diplomatic appointments In May 2025 the Ministry of External Affairs named Anurag Bhushan as India's next Ambassador to the Kingdom of Sweden. He belongs to the 1995 batch of the Indian Foreign Service and was Additional Secretary heading the Emigration Policy and Welfare division before this posting. The Indian mission in Stockholm works largely on innovation, clean energy and sustainability, the pillars of the India-Sweden partnership. So option (b) is the correct answer.

Union Budget 2025-26 The Union Budget 2025-26 speech noted that the total number of students in the 23 IITs has doubled from 65,000 to 1.35 lakh over the past 10 years. On that basis the Budget proposed extra infrastructure in the five IITs set up after 2014, to seat 6,500 more students. So the blank is filled by 10, and option (c) is the correct answer.

Waqf (Amendment) Bill 2025 The Waqf (Amendment) Bill 2025, enacted as the UMEED Act, was brought in mainly to streamline the management of Waqf properties. It provides for compulsory online registration of Waqf property, a larger role for the District Collector in surveys and disputes, and representation for Muslim women and non-Muslim members on Waqf Boards and the Central Waqf Council. It neither dissolves the Boards nor transfers properties to private trusts, and it increases rather than reduces official oversight, so the other three options fail. So option (b) is the correct answer.

National skilling initiative SOAR — Skilling for AI Readiness — was launched in July 2025 by the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE), in the tenth year of the Skill India Mission. It is a school-level AI-literacy programme: three modules of 15 hours each for students of Classes 6 to 12 and one 45-hour module for teachers, covering the basics of machine learning and the ethical use of AI. The clue in such questions is the word 'Skilling' in the name — every Skill India initiative is owned by MSDE, so the Ministry of Education or of Science & Technology can be set aside. Hence option (d) is correct.

Indian indices and bodies The Export Preparedness Index (EPI) of India is prepared by NITI Aayog along with the Institute for Competitiveness. It ranks the States and Union Territories on four pillars — Policy, Business Ecosystem, Export Ecosystem and Export Performance — so that every State can see exactly where its export effort is weak. The first edition came out in 2020. Ranking States against one another to spur reform is the work of competitive federalism, which is NITI Aayog's role; the Ministry of Commerce and Industry frames trade policy but does not publish this index. Hence option (c) is correct.

Viral disease and host The primary natural host, or reservoir, of the Nipah virus is the fruit bat of the genus Pteropus, commonly called the flying fox. These bats carry the virus without falling ill themselves. People catch it by drinking raw date-palm sap or eating fruit soiled by bat saliva or urine, and thereafter from person to person. The pig is only an intermediate or amplifying host — that is how the first outbreak, in Malaysia in 1998, spread — while mosquitoes and ticks play no part, because Nipah is not a vector-borne disease. Hence option (b) is correct.

Wildlife sanctuary and state Punjab has proposed to develop the Jhajjar-Bachauli Wildlife Sanctuary as the State's first leopard safari destination. The sanctuary lies in Rupnagar (Ropar) district near Sri Anandpur Sahib, in the Shivalik foothills; the proposal was announced in the State Budget for 2025-26, together with a plan to develop Nangal as a tourism hub. Besides the leopard it shelters sambar, barking deer and rich Shivalik bird life, so the safari is meant to join conservation with local employment. Hence option (a) is correct.

Gharana of Hindustani music The Bettiah Gharana of Dhrupad belongs to Bihar — Bettiah is the headquarters of West Champaran district. It grew under the patronage of the Bettiah Raj and is counted among the oldest surviving schools of Dhrupad, keeping alive the Nauhar and Khandar baani of that style. The Mishra family of Bettiah has carried the lineage down the generations, which is why the gharana is spoken of as the Mishra tradition of Dhrupad; the neighbouring Darbhanga Gharana, also of Bihar, is its close cousin. Hence option (a) is correct.

Medieval fort architecture The fortification of the Gwalior hill is traced to Raja Sourya Sena (Suraj Sen), who is said to have completed the wall around the plateau in about 773 CE. The legend attached to the fort says the chief was cured of leprosy by the hermit Gwalipa and named the fort — and afterwards the town — after him. Later rulers only built upon this base: the Tomar king Man Singh raised the Man Mandir palace in the fifteenth century, after which the Mughals, the Marathas and the Scindias held the fort, which Babur called 'the pearl among the fortresses of Hind'. Hence option (c) is correct.

Folk dance of a region 'Spao', also written Spao-tses, is the warrior dance of Ladakh. Male dancers in traditional Ladakhi dress, carrying swords and shields, move in slow measured steps to the drum and the surna, recalling the martial past of the region's kings and soldiers. It is performed at Losar and other major festivals. Jabro and Shondol are the other well-known Ladakhi dances, the Shondol having once been reserved for the royal court. Hence option (a) is correct.

Science and technology news The telescope named 'Three Gorges Antarctic Eye' was put into operation by China in April 2025 at its Zhongshan Station in Antarctica. It is a 3.2-metre aperture radio and millimetre-wave telescope built by China Three Gorges University with Shanghai Normal University, and it takes its name from that university. It observes the spectral lines of neutral hydrogen and ammonia to study interstellar gas and the birth of stars; the dry, cold, stable Antarctic air is ideal for millimetre-wave astronomy. Hence option (a) is correct.

Transport technology news India's first hyperloop test track was inaugurated in March 2025 at the Discovery Campus of IIT Madras at Thaiyur, near Chennai. The 422-metre tube is at present the longest hyperloop test track in Asia. It was built by the student team Avishkar Hyperloop with TuTr Hyperloop, an IIT Madras start-up, and was supported by the Ministry of Railways. A hyperloop drives a magnetically levitated pod through a near-vacuum tube, so air drag almost vanishes and very high speeds become possible with little energy. Hence option (b) is correct.

Globalisation term Getting a service done regularly by an outside agency instead of doing it inside the firm is called outsourcing. Companies outsource call centres, accounting, payroll and IT support so as to cut costs and concentrate on their core work, while the outside agency supplies the specialised skill. Monetisation means turning an asset into money, diversification means adding new products or markets, and liberalisation means removing government restrictions on business — none of these describes hiring an outside agency. Hence option (a) is correct.

Company rule in India The policy of 'paramountcy' was first put forward under Lord Hastings, Governor-General from 1813 to 1823. Under it the East India Company claimed that its authority was paramount — supreme over every Indian state — so it could annex, or threaten to annex, any kingdom in order to protect what it called British interests. This was the doctrine at work in the Anglo-Nepalese and the third Anglo-Maratha wars of his time, and it turned the Company from a trading body into the political overlord of India. Hence option (a) is correct.

Committees on Indian economy The 1997 report on the small enterprises sector came from the committee chaired by Abid Hussain. The Abid Hussain Committee on Small Scale Industries supplied both the conceptual basis and a workable framework for reform: it asked that the reservation of products for the small-scale sector be dismantled and that the sector be treated as small and medium enterprises. Its stress on technology, credit and infrastructure rather than protection is the line of thinking that later produced the MSMED Act of 2006. Hence option (d) is correct.

Sectors of the economy The sector that turns the raw material of the primary sector into finished or semi-finished goods is the secondary sector. It is also called the manufacturing or industrial sector: cotton becomes cloth, sugarcane becomes sugar, iron ore becomes steel. Construction and power generation are counted in it as well. The primary sector takes its produce straight from nature — farming, mining, fishing, forestry — and the tertiary or service sector supplies services such as transport, banking and trade, so neither of them fits the description. Hence option (a) is correct.

Public sector steel plants The Rourkela Steel Plant in Odisha was set up in 1959. It was the first integrated steel plant of the public sector in India, built during the Second Five Year Plan with West German collaboration, and the first plant in Asia to use the LD (Linz-Donawitz) oxygen process of steel making. Its two companions of the same plan — Bhilai, built with Soviet help, and Durgapur, built with British help — belong to the same phase of industrialisation, and all three are run today by SAIL. Hence option (b) is correct.

Five Year Plans The Eighth Five Year Plan could not begin in 1990 as scheduled, so the two years 1990-91 and 1991-92 were run as Annual Plans. The delay was caused by political instability at the Centre and by the balance-of-payments crisis of 1991, when the foreign exchange reserves fell to about a fortnight's imports. The Eighth Plan therefore ran from 1992 to 1997 and became the plan of the LPG reforms — liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation. Hence option (d) is correct.

Employment statistics Current Weekly Status (CWS) is one of the measures of employment and unemployment used by the National Statistical Office in the Periodic Labour Force Survey. Under CWS the reference period is the seven days before the date of the survey, and a person is counted as employed if he worked for at least one hour on any one day of that week. It stands between Usual Status, which looks back 365 days, and Current Daily Status, which counts each half-day, so CWS is the measure that catches short-term and seasonal joblessness. Hence option (a) is correct.

Factors of population change Birth rate is the natural factor of population change among the four options. Natural change is birth rate minus death rate: when births exceed deaths the population grows. Both are biological processes and work without anyone moving into or out of the region. Migration does alter the number of people in a place, but it is a social or mechanical factor, and urbanisation policy and industrial development are economic factors that act only indirectly. Hence option (a) is correct.

Blood pressure The pressure of blood on the walls of the arteries while the heart muscle is relaxed is the diastolic pressure. Diastole is the relaxation phase, in which the chambers of the heart fill with blood; systole is the contraction phase, and the pressure during it is the systolic pressure. A normal reading is written as 120/80 mm Hg — 120 is systolic and 80 is diastolic — so the smaller of the two figures is always the diastolic value. Hence option (a) is correct.

Human brain and reflexes Salivation, vomiting, sneezing and coughing are involuntary reflexes controlled by the medulla oblongata, a part of the hindbrain. The hindbrain has three parts — the cerebellum, the pons and the medulla; the medulla is the lowest of them and joins the brain to the spinal cord. It also holds the vital centres for the heartbeat, blood pressure and breathing. The cerebral cortex and the thalamus belong to the forebrain and the tectum to the midbrain, so none of them can be the answer. Hence option (c) is correct.

Mahajanapadas and capitals Rajagriha, the modern Rajgir in Bihar, was the first capital of the Magadha Mahajanapada. It was also called Girivraja, because it lay in a valley ringed by five hills, which gave it a natural fortification of stone — the reason Bimbisara and Ajatashatru ruled from there. Ajatashatru's successor Udayin later shifted the capital to Pataliputra, near the meeting of the Ganga and the Son, which was better placed for both trade and defence. Hence option (d) is correct.