11 February 2025 · Shift 2

Directive Principles - Article 49 Correct option: (d) To protect all monuments of historic interest and national importance. Article 49 places an obligation on the State to protect every monument, place or object of artistic or historic interest that Parliament has declared to be of national importance, from spoliation, disfigurement, destruction, removal, disposal or export. It lies in Part IV (Articles 36-51) of the Constitution and is the Directive Principle that pairs with Article 51A(f), the Fundamental Duty to value and preserve our composite culture. The other three are genuine constitutional provisions put in the wrong slot: defending the country is a Fundamental Duty under Article 51A(d), organising village panchayats is Article 40, and just and humane conditions of work with maternity relief is Article 42.

Layers of the Earth Correct option: (b) silicate. The answer is hidden in the name itself: 'Sima' is coined from Si (silica/silicate) and Ma (magnesium), so the lower, denser layer of the crust is the one made of magnesium-rich silicate rocks. This layer is basaltic and forms the floor of the oceans; above it lies 'Sial' (silica + alumina), the lighter granitic layer that makes up the continents, and far below the crust the innermost core is called 'Nife' (nickel + ferrum), with a radius of about 3,500 km. Sillimanite, sigloite and silinaite are all real minerals, but each is a single rare mineral species, not the broad rock-forming group that the term 'Sima' stands for.

Thaipusam festival Correct option: (d) Tamil Nadu. Thaipusam is celebrated by Tamil devotees of Lord Murugan (Kartikeya), the son of Shiva and Parvati, on the full-moon day of the Tamil month of Thai, when the moon stands in the Pusam (Pushya) nakshatra - the two words together give the festival its name. Devotees carry the kavadi and offer milk pots at the Murugan temples of Tamil Nadu such as Palani and Thiruchendur; the festival is equally famous among the Tamil diaspora in Malaysia, Singapore and Sri Lanka. The other three states have no Tamil Murugan tradition: Sikkim and Tripura lie in the north-east, and the festivals typical of Telangana are Bathukamma and Bonalu.

UPSC Chairperson 2024 Correct option: (b) Manoj Soni. Dr. Manoj Soni resigned as Chairman of the Union Public Service Commission in July 2024 on personal grounds, although his term as Chairman would have run to May 2029. He had joined the Commission as a Member in 2017 and became its Chairman in May 2023. Preeti Sudan, a former Union Health Secretary and then the senior-most Member, succeeded him and took charge as UPSC Chairperson on 1 August 2024 - which is why her name is the tempting distractor here. The UPSC is a constitutional body under Articles 315-323, created on 1 October 1926 as the Public Service Commission with Sir Ross Barker as its first chairman; it recruits for the All India Services and the Central Civil Services.

Satiety and appetite Correct option: (c) satiety. Satiety is the physiological state of fullness that follows a meal and switches off the desire to eat; its opposite, hunger, is what makes us start eating. It is produced by several signals acting together - stretch receptors in the stomach wall, the hormone leptin released by fat tissue, and gut hormones such as cholecystokinin - working against ghrelin, the 'hunger hormone' secreted by an empty stomach. The other three are stages or products of digestion, not states of appetite: ingestion is the taking in of food, chyme is the semi-fluid mixture of food and gastric juice that leaves the stomach, and defecation is the expulsion of undigested waste.

Literacy rate, Census 2011 Correct option: (a) Mizoram. Census 2011 records Mizoram's literacy rate as 91.33% - the highest in the north-east and the third highest in the country, after Kerala (93.91%) and Lakshadweep (91.85%). Mizoram's figure is also unusually even between the sexes: 93.35% for males against 89.27% for females, a gap of about 4 points, whereas India's male-female gap is nearly 17 points. Tripura, at 87.22%, is the closest north-eastern rival; Assam (72.19%) and Arunachal Pradesh (65.38%) are far behind, the latter being the lowest in the region.

Second Five-Year Plan Correct option: (a) Emphasised the development of heavy industries. The First Plan (1951-56) was based on the Harrod-Domar model and put agriculture, irrigation and power first, because food shortages and the dislocation of Partition had to be dealt with before anything else. The Second Plan (1956-61) followed the Mahalanobis model, whose argument was that a poor country grows fastest by first building the industries that make machines - so the plan went for heavy, capital-goods industry led by the public sector. Its visible results were the steel plants at Bhilai (with the USSR), Rourkela (West Germany) and Durgapur (UK), and it rested on the Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956, which reserved the commanding heights of the economy for the public sector - which is exactly why option (c) is wrong.

R. Vaishali - chess Correct option: (a) Chess. R. Vaishali (Rameshbabu Vaishali) of Chennai is a chess player who became India's third woman Grandmaster, after Koneru Humpy and Harika Dronavalli. She won the Women's Grand Swiss 2023, which carried her into the Women's Candidates Tournament 2024, and she took a bronze medal at the World Blitz Championship. She and her younger brother R. Praggnanandhaa are the first brother-sister pair in the world to both hold the Grandmaster title, and she was part of the Indian women's team that won gold at the 45th Chess Olympiad, Budapest, in 2024.

Indian Councils Act, 1861 Correct option: (b) Indian Councils Act. The Indian Councils Act, 1861 allowed the Viceroy to nominate Indians as non-official members of his enlarged legislative council - the first entry of Indians into law-making - and it restored legislative powers to the Bombay and Madras Presidencies, beginning the process of decentralisation. It also gave statutory recognition to the portfolio system that Lord Canning had introduced, and empowered the Viceroy to issue ordinances during an emergency. The distractors belong to other years: the Government of India Acts are of 1858, 1919 and 1935, the Rowlatt Act is of 1919, and the Indian Independence Act is of 1947.

Sangeet Natak Akademi Award Correct option: (d) ₹1,00,000. The Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (Akademi Puraskar) carries a purse of ₹1,00,000, together with a Tamrapatra (an engraved copper plaque) and an Angavastram (a ceremonial shawl). The Akademi's higher honour, the Fellowship or Akademi Ratna, is restricted to 40 living persons at any time and carries ₹3,00,000 - which is exactly why option (a) is placed here as the trap. The Sangeet Natak Akademi, set up in 1952-53, is India's national academy for music, dance and drama; the honours are conferred by the President of India, and the Presidential Awards of 1952 and 1953 were later merged into its own list of awardees.

Eleventh Five-Year Plan Correct option: (d) 9%. The Eleventh Five-Year Plan (2007-12), whose theme was 'Towards Faster and More Inclusive Growth', fixed an overall GDP growth target of 9%; the growth actually achieved over the five years was about 8%. Inside that 9% the sectoral targets were 4% for agriculture, about 10% for industry and 9-11% for services, and the plan had an outlay of roughly ₹36.4 lakh crore. The Planning Commission that drew it up was chaired ex officio by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with Montek Singh Ahluwalia as Deputy Chairman, and the National Development Council approved the plan in December 2007.

Foundation of Mauryan Empire Correct option: (a) Chandragupta Maurya. Chandragupta Maurya founded the Mauryan Empire in 322 BCE by overthrowing Dhana Nanda of Magadha and seizing Pataliputra, guided by his teacher Chanakya (Kautilya or Vishnugupta), the author of the Arthashastra. Around 305 BCE he defeated Seleucus Nicator and gained territory west of the Indus; Seleucus sent Megasthenes to his court, whose account Indica is a key source for the period. The other three - Dasaratha, Samprati and Shalishuka - were also Mauryas, but all of them ruled after Ashoka, during the decline of the empire.

Oersted's experiment Correct option: (d) 1820. In 1820 the Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted observed that a compass needle kept near a current-carrying wire was deflected, and that the needle swung the other way when the direction of the current was reversed. That single observation proved that an electric current produces a magnetic field around itself, and so joined electricity and magnetism into one subject - electromagnetism. Everything that followed grew out of it: Ampere's work later in the 1820s, Faraday's law of electromagnetic induction in 1831, and in due course the electric motor and the generator. The CGS unit of magnetising field, the oersted, is named after him.

Musicians and instruments Correct option: (c) Flute. Pandit Bholanath Prasanna was a flute (bansuri) player of the Banaras gharana, and he is remembered above all as the guru of Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia. He was honoured with the Uttar Pradesh Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1989 for his work on the instrument. For questions of this kind the safest preparation is to hold one famous name against each instrument: flute - Hariprasad Chaurasia, sitar - Ravi Shankar, jaltarang - Milind Tulankar.

Functions of money Correct option: (d) money. A medium of exchange is anything that is generally accepted in payment for goods and services, and this is the primary function of money. By performing it, money removes the 'double coincidence of wants' that barter demands - a weaver no longer has to find a farmer who happens to want cloth. The other functions of money follow from this one: a measure of value or unit of account, a store of value, and a standard of deferred payment. A commodity or a metal becomes a medium of exchange only when a society agrees to accept it as money (commodity money, metallic money); on its own neither is one, and water is not a medium of exchange at all.

Strength of the Supreme Court Correct option: (c) Seven. When the Supreme Court of India began work in January 1950, its sanctioned strength was eight judges in all - the Chief Justice of India together with seven other judges. Article 124(1) leaves the number to Parliament, and as the pendency of cases grew the strength was raised again and again, reaching 34 (the CJI plus 33 judges) in 2019. Option (a), 'Eight', is the trap: eight is the total including the Chief Justice, whereas the question asks only for the number of other judges. The first Chief Justice was H. J. Kania, and Articles 124 to 147 deal with the Supreme Court.

Foreign honours to PM Modi Correct option: (a) Order of St. Andrew the Apostle. During his visit to Moscow in July 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was conferred Russia's highest civilian honour, the Order of St. Andrew the Apostle, for his contribution to the special and privileged strategic partnership between India and Russia. The Order was instituted by Tsar Peter the Great in 1698 and is named after Saint Andrew, the patron saint of Russia; the decision to give it to Mr. Modi was announced in 2019 and the award was actually presented in 2024. The other three names are not Russian state honours at all, which is enough to eliminate them.

KSS Memorial Shooting Championship Correct option: (a) 21st. The Kumar Surendra Singh Memorial Shooting Championship held in 2023 was its 21st edition, conducted by the National Rifle Association of India (NRAI). The championship ran at two venues: the pistol events at the M.P. State Shooting Academy, Bhopal, and the rifle events at Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram) in Kerala, both in June 2023. It is held in memory of Kumar Surendra Singh, a long-serving president of the NRAI, and works as a national selection platform where shooters from all over the country compete.

Population share, Census 2011 Correct option: (c) 16.5%. Census 2011 puts Uttar Pradesh's population at about 19.98 crore and India's at about 121.08 crore. Share $=\frac{19.98}{121.08}\times 100\approx 16.5$ per cent. So roughly one Indian in six lives in Uttar Pradesh - it is the most populous state in the country, with more people than Pakistan had at the time, and it would rank about fifth in the world if it were a separate country. Other Census 2011 figures for the state that are worth carrying: density 829 persons per sq km, literacy 67.68% and sex ratio 912, against the national sex ratio of 943.

Popir folk dance Correct option: (d) Arunachal Pradesh. Popir is a folk dance of the Galo tribe of Arunachal Pradesh, performed mainly by young women during the Mopin festival, which is celebrated for a good harvest and the well-being of the community. The state's other well-known dances are the Ponung of the Adi tribe and the Bardo Chham of the Sherdukpens, so a dance named along with a tribe of the north-east usually points to Arunachal Pradesh. The dances typical of the other options are quite different: Theyyam in Kerala, Dekhnni in Goa and Chholiya in Uttarakhand.