12 February 2025 · Shift 1

Tribal folk dances 'Ladaladi' is a wedding folk dance of the Bhils. The dance is named after what happens in it - the bride and the bridegroom are hoisted on the shoulders of their kinsmen and the rest of the gathering dances in a ring around the raised couple. Place the tribe and you place the dance: the Bhils are the large tribal community of the Vindhya-Satpura belt, spread over Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra, and their other well-known dances are Ghoomar, Gair and Bhagoria. The other three tribes live far from that belt and their wedding and festival dances are different ones altogether.

Five-Year Plans The Seventh Five-Year Plan (1985-90) is the plan built on the slogan 'Food, Work and Productivity'. Its three words are its three targets - raise food grain output, create employment, and lift productivity by modernising technology - and it was framed under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi with anti-poverty programmes such as Jawahar Rozgar Yojana as its instruments. It aimed at 5% annual growth and achieved about 6%, the best performance of any plan up to that time. Each of the other plans carried a theme of its own, so matching plan to theme settles the question.

Census definition of literacy In the Indian Census a person is counted as literate only from the age of 7 years. The definition has two parts that must both hold: the person is aged 7 or above, and can read AND write with understanding in any one language - being able only to read, or only to sign one's name, does not make a person literate. Because everyone below 7 is treated as illiterate by definition, the literacy rate is calculated on the population aged 7 and above, not on the whole population; on that basis the 2011 Census recorded 74.04%. The age was 5 years in the censuses up to 1981 and was raised to 7 from the 1991 Census, which is why 5 years is offered as a distractor.

Infant mortality rate Among India's neighbours listed here, Sri Lanka had the lowest infant mortality rate in 2023. IMR counts the deaths of infants below one year of age per 1,000 live births in a year, so a low value signals near-universal institutional delivery, immunisation, safe drinking water and female literacy - the fields in which Sri Lanka's health system has led South Asia for decades. Sri Lanka's rate is in single digits while the other three are far higher, Pakistan being the highest in the neighbourhood, so none of them can be the lowest.

International honours to PM The Dominica Award of Honour recognises Prime Minister Narendra Modi's contribution during the COVID-19 pandemic. The specific act honoured is India's gift of 70,000 doses of AstraZeneca (Covishield) vaccine to Dominica in February 2021 under the Vaccine Maitri initiative, which let the small Caribbean island vaccinate its own people and pass doses on to its neighbours. It is Dominica's highest national honour and was conferred in November 2024 at the second India-CARICOM Summit held in Guyana. Read the options against who is giving the award: Dominica honours what India did for Dominica, so purely domestic Indian achievements in agriculture or IT, or a general reference to a first term in office, cannot be the ground for it.

Indian swimmers Srihari Nataraj belongs to Karnataka - he was born and trained in Bengaluru. He is India's leading backstroke swimmer, holding the national records in the 50 m, 100 m and 200 m backstroke, and he represented India at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. His state honour fixes the state by itself: he has received the Ekalavya Award, which is given by the Government of Karnataka to its outstanding sportspersons.

History of the BCCI RE Grant Govan was the first president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India. The BCCI was founded in December 1928 and Grant Govan, a Delhi-based British businessman, was elected its first president, with Anthony de Mello as the first secretary - remember the pair together and the first president is never in doubt. The BCCI was admitted to the Imperial Cricket Conference in 1926 and India played its first Test in 1932; its headquarters today is the Cricket Centre at the Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai. The other three names are genuine BCCI presidents, but each came decades later.

Wholesale trade A wholesaler is a trader who buys and sells goods in large quantities. He buys in bulk directly from the producer and breaks that bulk into smaller lots for retailers, so he is the middle link in the chain producer - wholesaler - retailer - consumer; he also stores the stock and carries the risk of holding it until it sells. Each wrong option names a different person in that same chain: selling in small quantities is the retailer, moving the goods is the transporter, and making the goods is the producer.

Ambedkar's organisations Dr B.R. Ambedkar founded the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha in July 1924 at Bombay. Its name states its purpose - 'association for the welfare of the excluded' - and it worked through hostels, free libraries, night schools and study circles, under the motto 'Educate, Agitate, Organise'. The other three organisations were the work of other reformers, so a question that asks specifically for Ambedkar's own body rules them out.

Sangeet Natak Akademi Awards In its 2011 meeting the Executive Board of the Sangeet Natak Akademi decided to give 9 Akademi Awards in the field of dance. The Akademi Puraskar is the Akademi's annual honour for performing artists, and the Board fixes the number separately for each field - music, dance, theatre and the traditional, folk and tribal arts - so the dance quota of 9 is decided on its own and does not have to match any other field. Each award carries a purse, a tamrapatra and an angavastram, and it is conferred by the President of India. Anchor the institution with the number: the Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's national academy for music, dance and drama, was set up on 31 May 1953, its first chairman was P.V. Rajamannar, and its highest honour is the Akademi Fellowship (Ratna Sadasya), limited to 40 living persons at a time.

Farm household income The 77th round of the NSO's Situation Assessment Survey of agricultural households puts the average monthly income of such a household at ₹10,218 (reference year 2018-19). That is the paid-out expenses estimate: only the expenses actually paid out are deducted from receipts. When the imputed value of family labour and of owned assets is deducted as well, the same survey reports the slightly lower figure of ₹10,084. The figure is the sum of five sources, and adding them back is the quickest check on the answer. ₹6,426 is the tempting option because that was the corresponding average in the earlier 70th round (2012-13) - a real figure, but of the previous survey.

Gandhi Jayanti Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born at Porbandar, Gujarat on 2 October 1869. The number of the birth anniversary is simply the number of years completed since birth: 2023-1869=154 So 2 October 2023 was his 154th birth anniversary; as a cross-check, 2 October 2019 was the widely celebrated 150th, and four years later gives 154. The day is observed worldwide as the International Day of Non-Violence, declared by the UN General Assembly in 2007.

Writ jurisdiction Article 226 empowers every High Court to issue writs. Its reach is actually wider than the Supreme Court's writ power under Article 32: a High Court may issue a writ for the enforcement of a fundamental right AND 'for any other purpose', that is for an ordinary legal right, whereas Article 32 is confined to fundamental rights alone. The five writs are habeas corpus, mandamus, prohibition, certiorari and quo warranto - the same five for both courts. The other three Articles deal with entirely different subjects, so none of them can carry writ power.

National Security Advisor Ajit Doval was reappointed National Security Advisor in June 2024, for a third consecutive term. He has held the office since 2014 and is a retired IPS officer of the Kerala cadre who headed the Intelligence Bureau in 2004-05; he is the first police officer to receive the Kirti Chakra, India's second-highest peacetime gallantry award. The NSA is the Prime Minister's chief adviser on national security and heads the National Security Council Secretariat; India's first NSA was Brajesh Mishra (1998). Shivshankar Menon is the tempting name because he genuinely was NSA - from 2010 to 2014, immediately before Doval - but the June 2024 reappointment was Doval's.

Diseases and organs affected Take each disease to the organ it settles in. Tuberculosis is a bacterial infection carried in airborne droplets that lodges in the lungs, so i - c. Hepatitis is an inflammation of the liver, and its very name says so, so ii - d. Gonorrhoea is a sexually transmitted bacterial infection of the reproductive tract, so iii - b. Mumps is a viral infection that swells the parotid salivary glands, so iv - a. Only option (c) carries all four of these pairs; every other option breaks at least one of them.

Ashokan inscriptions Ashoka's edicts were written mainly in Prakrit, the everyday spoken language, using the Brahmi script. The choice was deliberate: the edicts were public proclamations of Dhamma meant to be read out to ordinary subjects, so the language of the people was used and not the scholarly Sanskrit. At the frontiers the script and language changed with the region, but those are exceptions to the main practice; Brahmi itself was deciphered by James Prinsep in 1837, which is how these inscriptions became readable again.

Naming alkynes Count the carbons in the formula: $C{H}_3-C\equiv CH$ has three carbon atoms and one carbon-carbon triple bond, so its molecular formula is $C_3{H}_4$. Name it from that count: 'prop-' stands for three carbons and '-yne' for a triple bond, and the '1-' says the triple bond begins at the first carbon - the compound is 1-propyne, also called methylacetylene. It fits the description too: it is a colourless gas with a sweet odour that liquefies easily under pressure, and it is the chief component of MAPP gas used in welding. The other three names give the wrong carbon count, and the carbon count is the one feature the formula fixes.

Rain gauge The collector of a standard rain gauge is funnel-shaped. The funnel has a rim of fixed diameter - 200 mm in the standard Indian gauge - and it channels every drop falling on that known area into a narrow measuring tube below, so a shallow depth of rain becomes a tall column of water that can be read accurately. Because the mouth area is fixed and known, the reading converts directly into rainfall per unit area in millimetres. That is exactly what a disc or a prism could not do: neither gathers water from a known area into a narrow tube, so neither can turn a few millimetres of rain into a readable column.

Tabla gharanas Zakir Hussain belonged to the Punjab gharana of tabla. A player's gharana is fixed by his guru-shishya line and not by the city he lives in, and Zakir Hussain's guru was his own father Ustad Alla Rakha, a Punjab gharana master - which is why a Mumbai-born artist is counted in the Punjab gharana. The Punjab gharana grew out of the pakhawaj tradition, so it is known for powerful, fast, resonant bols; Zakir Hussain won five Grammy Awards and the Padma Vibhushan and co-founded the fusion group Shakti. The distractors are real gharanas but belong to other lines - Delhi and Benaras are separate tabla gharanas with their own founding families, and Indore is chiefly a khayal (vocal) gharana, not a tabla one.

Constitutional amendments The Constitution (One Hundred and First Amendment) Act, 2016 paved the way for the Goods and Services Tax. It made three key insertions: Article 246A, letting the Union and the States tax the same supply; Article 269A, for tax on inter-State supply; and Article 279A, creating the GST Council chaired by the Union Finance Minister. GST itself came into force on 1 July 2017, subsuming excise duty, service tax, VAT and most other indirect taxes into one levy. The number is what trips students up: the measure was introduced in 2014 as the 122nd Constitution Amendment Bill, but a Bill's number and the Act's number are different, and on enactment it became the 101st Amendment Act.