6 February 2025 · Shift 1

Thomas Cup 2022 India beat Indonesia 3-0 in the Thomas Cup final at Bangkok on 15 May 2022, lifting the men's team world title for the first time in 73 years of trying. Memory hook: the side that had never won it swept aside Indonesia, the record 14-time champion, without dropping a single tie in the final. Lakshya Sen won the opening singles, Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty the doubles, and Kidambi Srikanth sealed it in the second singles. Malaysia, Japan and Denmark are all past Thomas Cup winners, which is why they sit in the options, but none of them was India's opponent in the 2022 final.

Rangarajan Committee The Rangarajan Committee, set up in 2012 under C. Rangarajan and reporting in 2014, was asked to re-examine how India measures its poverty line, after the Tendulkar line was attacked as too low. It raised the line to ₹32 a day in rural areas and ₹47 a day in urban areas, which pushed the 2011-12 poverty ratio up to 29.5% against Tendulkar's 21.9%. Banking is the tempting option because C. Rangarajan was a Governor of the RBI, but the committee that carries his name in exams is the poverty-estimation one.

73rd Amendment Act The State Finance Commission is created by Article 243-I, which the 73rd Constitutional Amendment Act, 1992 inserted into the new Part IX of the Constitution. Under it the Governor of every state must constitute the commission every fifth year to review the finances of the Panchayats and recommend how state taxes and grants are shared with them. The 74th Amendment is the near miss: its Article 243Y only sends the Municipalities' finances to the very commission already set up under Article 243-I, so it uses that body rather than constituting it.

Folk dance of Arunachal Roppi is a folk dance of the Nyishi, the largest tribe of Arunachal Pradesh, performed by men with swords and shields at festivals such as Nyokum. Hook: in Arunachal every dance belongs to a tribe - Roppi and Rikham Pada to the Nyishi, Ponung to the Adi, Aji Lamu to the Monpa, the war dance to the Wancho. Kerala's Kathakali and Theyyam, Assam's Bihu and Karnataka's Yakshagana are all well documented dance forms with no Nyishi connection, so (a), (b) and (c) fail.

Rare earth elements The 17 rare earth elements are the 15 lanthanides (atomic numbers 57 to 71) plus scandium (Sc, 21) and yttrium (Y, 39). Sc and Y are counted in because they share group-3 chemistry with the lanthanides and turn up in the very same monazite and bastnaesite ores, so they cannot be separated from them in practice. 'Rare' is a misnomer worth remembering: cerium is commoner in the crust than copper. They are called rare because they almost never occur in concentrated, easily mined pockets. Molybdenum, palladium, ruthenium, zirconium, vanadium and niobium are ordinary transition metals; none of them is on the rare earth list.

Second Five-Year Plan The Second Five-Year Plan (1956-61) is called the Mahalanobis Plan after the statistician Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, whose two-sector model was its blueprint. Its central idea: build heavy and basic industries first - steel, machine tools, power - so that the capacity to make machines exists before consumer goods are chased. The Bhilai, Rourkela and Durgapur steel plants and the Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956, with its 'socialistic pattern of society', all belong to this plan. The First Plan is the tempting choice, but it ran on the Harrod-Domar model and put agriculture and irrigation first, not heavy industry.

Frontier Gandhi Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Pashtun leader of the North-West Frontier Province, was called the 'Frontier Gandhi'; his own people knew him as Badshah Khan or Bacha Khan. The title makes sense the moment you see the contrast: he carried Gandhian non-violence into the most warlike frontier of British India and made it hold. He founded the Khudai Khidmatgars ('Servants of God'), the red-shirted volunteers of 1929 who stayed unarmed even under fire at Peshawar's Qissa Khwani Bazaar in 1930. He was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1987, the first person who was not an Indian citizen to receive it. Maulana Azad, the youngest Congress president and later India's first Education Minister, and Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan's first Prime Minister, never carried the frontier title.

Fundamental Rights Articles Part III of the Constitution, Articles 12 to 35, carries the Fundamental Rights; Article 12 defines what 'the State' means for them and Article 35 gives Parliament alone the power to legislate on them. Fix the boundaries of the three big Parts and this question can never be missed: Part III is 12-35 (rights), Part IV is 36-51 (Directive Principles), Part IVA is 51A (duties). Articles 15 to 35 is the trap: it starts one article too late and drops Article 14, the Right to Equality before law, which is the very first of the rights. Articles 2 to 7 deal with new states and citizenship.

Khelo India University Games Uttar Pradesh hosted the 3rd Khelo India University Games in May-June 2023, spread over Lucknow, Varanasi, Gorakhpur and Gautam Buddha Nagar, with the shooting events in Delhi. The one detail that fixes it in memory is the mascot Jeetu, a barasingha or swamp deer, which is the state animal of Uttar Pradesh; the closing ceremony was held at Varanasi. The 4th edition is the near miss - it was held at Guwahati in Assam in February 2024, so 2023 with Uttar Pradesh can only be the 3rd.

Mizoram Health Minister Lalrinpuii of the Zoram People's Movement is Mizoram's Minister for Health and Family Welfare, sworn in on 8 December 2023 in Chief Minister Lalduhoma's cabinet. She is the fact worth remembering because she is the first woman ever to hold a cabinet-rank post in Mizoram; she won from Lunglei East and also holds Social Welfare and Women and Child Development. Mizoram is small in the Union - 1 Lok Sabha seat, 1 Rajya Sabha seat and a 40-member Assembly - which is why its single woman minister is a standard current-affairs item. Nagaland is the state usually confused with it here, since Nagaland got its first women MLAs only in 2023, but Lalrinpuii is a Mizo name and a Mizoram minister.

Shantala Natya Sri Award The Government of Karnataka instituted the Shantala Natya Sri Award in 1995 to honour lifetime achievement in classical dance. The name itself gives the state away: it commemorates Shantaladevi, queen of the Hoysala king Vishnuvardhana and a celebrated dancer, whose figure is carved on the Hoysala temple at Belur in Karnataka. Karnataka's other state honours in the arts - the Rajyotsava Prashasti, the Pampa Award for literature and the Basava Puraskar - follow the same habit of naming an award after a Kannada figure. Tamil Nadu is the tempting option because classical dance is instinctively linked with Bharatanatyam, but the Hoysala connection is Kannada, not Tamil.

Layers of the atmosphere Weather - cloud, rain, thunderstorm, cyclone - happens in the troposphere, the lowest layer, which holds almost all of the atmosphere's water vapour and about three-fourths of its mass. The reason is the temperature profile: in the troposphere temperature falls with height at roughly 6.5°C per km, so warm surface air keeps rising, and that convection is what makes weather. In the stratosphere the ozone layer warms the air upwards, so temperature rises with height and the air is stable and non-convecting. That is exactly why jet aircraft cruise there and why weather cannot form in it.

Mitosis Mitosis is the equational division: one mother cell gives two daughter cells with exactly the same chromosome number, 2n to 2n. So statement (b) is the incorrect one. Halving belongs to meiosis, the reductional division, which takes 2n to n and ends in four daughter cells, not two - and it happens only in the cells that make gametes. Statements (a), (c) and (d) are all true of mitosis: it makes two identical daughter cells and it is the division behind growth of the body and repair of damaged tissue.

Objective of planning Planning was adopted so that the state could deliberately start and steer a process of development in a newly independent, largely agrarian economy. The Planning Commission was set up in 1950 and the First Five-Year Plan began in 1951. The four standard goals of the plans - growth, modernisation, self-reliance and equity - are all means to that one central objective. Privatisation cannot be it: the plans built a public-sector-led 'socialistic pattern of society', and privatisation entered Indian policy only with the 1991 reforms. Following British culture is the opposite of the plans' stated aim of self-reliance, and 'uniqueness' was never an economic objective at all.

Crowding out effect A high fiscal deficit has to be financed by borrowing, and the government borrows from the same pool of household savings that firms borrow from. That extra demand for a limited supply of loanable funds pushes the interest rate up; costlier credit makes marginal private projects unviable, so private investment falls. That squeeze is what 'crowding out' means. Options (a) and (d) describe the opposite effect, called crowding in, and (c) contradicts the premise itself, because a high deficit means more government borrowing, not less.

Chapchar Kut festival Chapchar Kut is Mizoram's spring festival, held in March once the bamboo and trees felled for jhum (shifting) cultivation have been cut and left to dry, and celebrated in anticipation of a good harvest. Its signature is the Cheraw or bamboo dance, in which dancers step in and out of clapping bamboo poles - the image to attach to the name. 'Kut' simply means festival in Mizo, so any 'Kut' in an exam points to Mizoram; Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and Kerala have no festival by this name.

Agriculture Leadership Award Maharashtra was named the Best Agriculture State for 2024 by the 15th Agriculture Leadership Awards Committee. The committee was chaired by Justice P. Sathasivam, a former Chief Justice of India and former Governor of Kerala, and its 2024 list covered individuals, states and institutions. The award recognised Maharashtra's spread of horticulture, micro-irrigation and farm mechanisation rather than sheer foodgrain output. Punjab and Haryana are the reflex answers because of their wheat and rice yields, but the 2024 state award did not go to either.

Religion in China Of the four faiths listed, Buddhism has by far the largest following in China and is the country's largest organised religion, with estimates around one-fifth of the population. The picture to hold: most Chinese are officially non-religious or follow Chinese folk religion blended with Taoism and Confucianism, and Buddhism is the one named world religion that sits on top of that mix. Buddhism entered China from India along the Silk Route in the first century CE, which is why it took root there and Hinduism did not. Christianity and Islam are small minorities in China, Islam mainly among the Hui and the Uyghurs, and Hinduism is negligible.

Mauryan Pataliputra sites Bulandibagh, on the edge of modern Patna, is where excavation uncovered the remains of the massive wooden palisade that ringed Mauryan Pataliputra. The find matters because it confirms Megasthenes: his Indica described Palibothra as defended by a timber wall pierced with loopholes, with 570 towers and 64 gates, and Bulandibagh gave the timber. Kumrahar is the near miss - it is the other Pataliputra site, but it yielded the eighty-pillared Mauryan hall, not the palisade. Bhita and Taxila are different cities altogether.

Carnatic percussion Ramnad V. Raghavan (1927-2009) was a mridangam vidwan of the Carnatic tradition; he taught the instrument at Wesleyan University in the United States from 1970 and helped start the Cleveland Thyagaraja Aradhana. The mridangam is the principal percussion instrument of Carnatic music - a barrel-shaped, two-headed drum played with the hands, the exact southern counterpart of the tabla's role in the north. Nadaswaram is the loud temple wind instrument of the south and sarangi a bowed string instrument of Hindustani music, so neither belongs to a Carnatic percussionist.