11 February 2025 · Shift 3

Mauryan sources Correct option: (b) Megasthenes. Megasthenes was sent by Seleucus Nicator (Seleucus I) as his ambassador to the court of Chandragupta Maurya at Pataliputra, roughly between 302 and 298 BCE. His book Indica survives only as quotations in later Greek writers, yet it remains the one eyewitness account of Mauryan administration, of the timber palisade and moat around the capital, and of the seven classes into which he divided Indian society. The other three never reached Pataliputra: Herodotus (5th century BCE) wrote chiefly about the Persian empire, while Pliny and Arrian lived centuries later and worked from earlier reports - Arrian's own Indica leans on Megasthenes.

SRS birth rate Correct option: (b) 19.5. The Sample Registration System (SRS) Bulletin for 2020, brought out by the Office of the Registrar General of India, puts the country's crude birth rate at 19.5 per 1,000 population. Read the three headline figures together: a birth rate of 19.5 against a death rate of 6.0 leaves a natural growth rate of about 13.5 per 1,000, and the infant mortality rate for the same year was 28 per 1,000 live births. The trend also fixes the value - the birth rate was 25.8 in 2000 and 21.4 in 2013 and has fallen steadily since, so for 2020 a figure just under 20 is the one to expect.

Dandi Salt March Correct option: (c) Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi set out from Sabarmati Ashram on 12 March 1930 with 78 chosen volunteers and walked about 240 miles (385 km) to the coastal village of Dandi, where on 6 April 1930 he picked up a lump of natural salt and broke the salt law. The march opened the Civil Disobedience Movement: the salt tax was chosen because it fell on the poorest household as heavily as on the richest, which made the protest instantly understandable to every Indian. The other three were associated with the movement but not with its leadership - Vallabhbhai Patel was arrested on 7 March 1930 for preparing the route, while Nehru and Rajendra Prasad organised support elsewhere.

Minimum Needs Programme Correct option: (d) Fifth. The Minimum Needs Programme (MNP) was launched in 1974-75, the very first year of the Fifth Five-Year Plan (1974-79). Its purpose was to deliver a basic package of social services to the poor - elementary education, rural health care, drinking water, rural roads, house sites for the landless, nutrition, rural electrification and slum improvement - on the argument that consumption of such services is itself an investment in human capital. The Fifth Plan was drafted by D. P. Dhar around the twin aims of removal of poverty (Garibi Hatao) and attainment of self-reliance; the Janata government ended it a year early, in 1978. Keep the neighbouring plans apart: the Fourth Plan (1969-74) stood for growth with stability, and the Sixth (1980-85) for the IRDP and the National Rural Employment Programme.

Competitive Yogasana events Correct option: (b) Rhythmic Yogasana (Single). Yogasana was recognised as a competitive sport in December 2020, and the National Yogasana Sports Federation conducts it in four judged events - Traditional Yogasana, Artistic Yogasana (Single), Artistic Yogasana (Pair) and Rhythmic Yogasana (Pair) - besides the group Free-Flow (Artistic Group) event. Rhythmic Yogasana is performed to music in a continuous flow and is contested only by a pair, so there is no Rhythmic Yogasana (Single) event; that is what the question is after. Remember the asymmetry: Artistic appears in both Single and Pair forms, Rhythmic only in the Pair form.

Award in current affairs Correct option: (d) Diabetes care and research. Dr Jitendra Singh is a physician by profession - a gold medallist in medicine who taught as a professor of medicine and worked as a diabetologist - and the Lifetime Achievement Award was given to him for his contribution to diabetes care and research. He has authored textbooks and a widely used handbook on diabetes and continues to hold clinics, which is why the award sits in this field and not in oncology, paediatrics or dermatology. Context worth carrying: he is the Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Science and Technology and for Earth Sciences, and Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office, and represents Udhampur in the Lok Sabha. Tip for such questions: match the award to the person's own profession - his medical speciality is diabetes, so option (d) follows.

Appointment of High Court judges Correct option: (b) President. Article 217 of the Constitution says that every Judge of a High Court, the Chief Justice included, is appointed by the President by warrant under his hand and seal. Before appointing, the President consults the Chief Justice of India and the Governor of the State; for a judge other than the Chief Justice, the Chief Justice of that High Court is consulted as well. The Governor is only consulted - his own function is to administer the oath of office to a High Court judge under Article 219, which is the detail the option is built on. Removal too is by an order of the President, passed after an address by both Houses of Parliament, exactly as for a judge of the Supreme Court.

Harvest festivals Correct option: (d) Onam. Onam is the harvest festival of Kerala and its official State festival, celebrated over ten days in Chingam, the first month of the Malayalam calendar (August-September), from Atham to Thiruvonam. It marks the annual homecoming of the legendary King Mahabali, and is kept with the pookalam (flower carpet), the Onasadya feast and the snake-boat races. The other three sit elsewhere in the year: Makar Sankranti and Pongal fall in mid-January when the sun enters Capricorn, and Assam's Bohag (Rongali) Bihu falls in mid-April.

Mixed economy Correct option: (d) Government and Private. A mixed economy is one in which the public (government) sector and the private sector both own the means of production and produce goods and services side by side - the State taking charge of infrastructure, defence and welfare, and private enterprise working for profit under regulation. It borrows from both systems: private ownership and the price mechanism from capitalism, and planning and public ownership from socialism. India is the standard example - the Industrial Policy Resolutions of 1948 and 1956 divided industries between the two sectors - so 'mixed' always means Government plus Private. The other pairs fail the test because corporate firms and foreign firms are themselves parts of the private sector, and cooperatives are member-owned private bodies, so none of those pairs brings in the State.

Constituent Assembly strength Correct option: (d) 299. The Constituent Assembly was constituted in November 1946 under the Cabinet Mission Plan with 389 seats - 296 from British India and 93 from the princely states. After the Mountbatten Plan of 3 June 1947 the members from the areas that formed Pakistan withdrew and set up their own assembly, so the strength of the Indian Constituent Assembly stood at 299 on 31 December 1947 - 229 from the provinces and 70 from the princely states. Store the pair 389 and 299 together: the first is the number before partition, the second the working strength after it and the number that finally signed the Constitution.

Census 2011 union territories Correct option: (d) Daman and Diu. Census 2011 counted 2,43,247 people in Daman and Diu, against 3,43,709 in Dadra and Nagar Haveli, 10,55,450 in Chandigarh and 12,47,953 in Puducherry. So among the four choices Daman and Diu is the smallest; the two are also the reason the pair was merged into a single Union Territory in January 2020. Do not confuse population with density: Lakshadweep, with 64,473 people, was the least populous Union Territory of all in 2011, while Delhi was the most populous and also the most densely settled.

Chhau dance Correct option: (b) Odisha. Mayurbhanj Chhau takes its name from Mayurbhanj district of Odisha, where it is performed at the spring festival of Chaitra Parva; its movements come from the martial exercises of Pharikhanda, done with sword and shield. It is the one Chhau style danced without a mask - the dancer's face itself carries the expression - which is the usual way the three styles are told apart. Chhau in all three styles was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010.

Table tennis rules Correct option: (a) No limit. A serve is a let when the ball, otherwise served correctly, touches the net assembly on its way over; the ITTF Laws of Table Tennis simply order the rally to be replayed and set no ceiling on how often this may happen in succession. So the server may keep producing lets one after another: no point is lost, no fault is recorded and the score does not move. The trap is to carry over the rule from tennis, where a let is replayed but a second service fault costs the point; in table tennis there is no such counting. Related terms: a rally is the period while the ball is in play, and a point is the rally in which the score is decided.

Satpura Range Correct option: (b) Satpura Range. The Satpura Range runs roughly east-west across central India and narrows eastwards to an apex near Ratnapuri, so that on the map it reads as a triangle whose two long sides follow the Narmada in the north and the Tapti in the south. Both rivers occupy rift valleys, which is why they run in straight parallel lines on either side of the range; the Satpura forms the northern edge of the Deccan Plateau and carries Dhupgarh (1,350 m), the highest point of Madhya Pradesh, in the Mahadeo Hills. The others do not fit the description: the Pir Panjal lies in the Himalayas of Jammu and Kashmir, the Purvanchal hills run along the north-eastern border, and the Aravalli runs north-east to south-west across Rajasthan.

Shehnai maestro Correct option: (b) Bismillah Khan. Ustad Bismillah Khan played the shehnai from the ramparts of the Red Fort on 15 August 1947 as the tricolour was unfurled, and he was invited again for the first Republic Day on 26 January 1950. He is the musician who lifted the shehnai from a wedding-and-temple instrument to the concert stage, and he stayed rooted in Varanasi all his life. He received the Bharat Ratna in 2001, only the third musician to be so honoured, besides the Padma Shri (1961), Padma Bhushan (1968) and Padma Vibhushan (1980). Match the others to their own art: Ali Akbar Khan played the sarod, Hemant Kumar was a singer and composer, and Ramnad Raghavan was a mridangam player.

Electromagnetic waves Correct option: (b) James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell's equations, published in the 1860s and 1870s, predicted that a changing electric and magnetic field should travel through space as a wave moving at the speed of light - but nobody had made such a wave in a laboratory. In 1887-88 Heinrich Hertz built a spark-gap transmitter and a small loop with a gap as receiver, produced the waves and detected them across the room, confirming Maxwell's prediction experimentally. The waves he generated were radio waves, the longest-wavelength part of the electromagnetic spectrum, running from about 3 kHz to 300 GHz; the SI unit of frequency is named the hertz after him. The other three names belong to different ideas: Thomas Young to the interference of light, Christiaan Huygens to the wave theory and secondary wavelets, and Christian Doppler to the change of frequency with relative motion.

Indian classical dance Correct option: (a) Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi. Yamini Krishnamurthy (1940-2024) trained at Kalakshetra under Rukmini Devi Arundale and made her debut in 1957; she was named the Asthana Narthaki, the resident dancer, of the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam for Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi. She is remembered as the torch-bearer of Kuchipudi, the style that grew out of the dance-drama tradition of Kuchipudi village in Andhra Pradesh, and she carried it to the national stage alongside her Bharatanatyam. Her awards run through all three grades of the civilian honours - Padma Shri (1968), Padma Bhushan (2001) and Padma Vibhushan (2016). The other pairs belong to other artists and regions: Mohiniattam to Kerala, Sattriya to Assam, Odissi to Odisha, Kathak to north India, Kathakali to Kerala and Manipuri to Manipur.

Union Council of Ministers Correct option: (d) Rajiv Ranjan Singh. Rajiv Ranjan Singh, known as Lalan Singh, of the Janata Dal (United), took charge in June 2024 as Union Cabinet Minister of Panchayati Raj and of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying, and held both portfolios in September 2024. He is the Lok Sabha member from Munger in Bihar and a former national president of his party. The Ministry of Panchayati Raj was created in May 2004 to look after the local self-government institutions set up by the 73rd Constitutional Amendment of 1992. The other three were in the same Council of Ministers with different charges: Nitin Gadkari with Road Transport and Highways, Piyush Goyal with Commerce and Industry, and Dharmendra Pradhan with Education.

Oil crisis and planning Correct option: (b) Caused economic disruptions and re-prioritisation. The OPEC embargo of October 1973 raised the price of crude about fourfold, and India, which imported most of its oil, met a sudden jump in its import bill just as the Fifth Plan (1974-79) was starting. The result was double-digit inflation, a strained balance of payments, industrial slowdown and unrest over prices, so the Plan had to be recast: outlays were revised, energy supply and self-reliance were pushed up the order of priority, and an anti-inflation package was imposed in 1974. That is exactly disruption followed by re-prioritisation, which is what option (b) states. The others fail on the record: industrialisation slowed rather than accelerated, the impact was too large to call insignificant, and agriculture was not de-emphasised - food self-sufficiency remained a central aim of the Plan.

Pteridophytes Correct option: (d) Ferns. Ferns are pteridophytes - the first vascular land plants, with a true root, stem and leaf and with xylem and phloem to conduct water and food, but with no seeds. They reproduce by spores borne in sori on the underside of the leaf, and their male gametes must swim to the egg, which is why ferns are confined to moist, shady ground and cool hill slopes. The other three are not pteridophytes: Porphyra is a red alga of the sea, while Sphagnum (a moss) and Riccia (a liverwort) are bryophytes - the amphibians of the plant kingdom, with no vascular tissue.