12 February 2025 · Shift 2

Directive Principles Correct option: (b) Article 48A. Article 48A is a Directive Principle of State Policy: the State shall endeavour to protect and improve the environment and to safeguard the forests and wild life of the country. It was inserted by the 42nd Constitutional Amendment Act, 1976, which added three new directives to Part IV; the same amendment created the matching Fundamental Duty in Article 51A(g), so care of the environment is a duty of the State under Article 48A and of the citizen under Article 51A(g). The other three do not exist in that form - Article 49 deals with the protection of monuments of national importance, while Articles 46 and 47 (welfare of weaker sections; public health) carry no such lettered clause.

Citrus flavouring chemical Correct option: (d) Limonene. Limonene is a cyclic terpene and makes up about 90 per cent of the oil pressed from the peel of oranges, lemons and other citrus fruits - it is the smell released when an orange is peeled. Its D-isomer, D-limonene, is added to soft drinks, sweets and chewing gum as a citrus flavour (it also masks bitter alkaloids in medicines) and is used as a fragrance and a natural degreasing solvent. The other three come from elsewhere: ethylvanillin is a synthetic vanilla flavour, menthone is obtained from peppermint oil, and lutidine is a pyridine derivative used in the laboratory, not in food.

Haryanka dynasty Correct option: (d) Ajatashatru. Bimbisara of the Haryanka dynasty was followed on the Magadhan throne by his son Ajatashatru (about 492-460 BCE), who is said to have imprisoned his father to seize power. Ajatashatru annexed Kosala and destroyed the Vajji (Lichchhavi) confederacy of Vaishali with the help of two war engines, the rathamusala and the mahashilakantaka; the First Buddhist Council was held at Rajagriha during his reign. Udayin was the next king after Ajatashatru - he shifted the capital to the new city of Pataliputra - while Chandragupta Maurya and Ashoka belong to the Mauryan dynasty, more than a century later.

Population density Correct option: (a) Bhutan. Population density is population divided by area. Bhutan has only about eight lakh people spread over 38,394 square kilometres of mountain country, which works out to roughly 21 persons per square kilometre - by far the lowest of the four. Bangladesh sits at the opposite end with more than 1,100 persons per square kilometre, among the densest countries in the world; Pakistan and Nepal lie in between, and India itself stood at 382 persons per square kilometre in Census 2011. The rule of thumb for such questions: a small Himalayan state with a tiny population (Bhutan) is thin, a small delta plain packed with people (Bangladesh) is dense.

Water cycle Correct option: (d) oceans, atmosphere and land. The water cycle is a closed circulation with three stores: water evaporates chiefly from the oceans, rises into the atmosphere as vapour, condenses into cloud, and falls back on land and sea as rain, snow or sleet. The share that falls on land returns as run-off through rivers or as groundwater seeping underground, and so reaches the ocean again - which is what closes the loop. So the answer must name all three reservoirs. Options that stop at rivers and oceans, or at clouds and the atmosphere, leave out a store the water actually passes through, and the cycle they describe never returns to its starting point.

Classical dance exponents Correct option: (a) Kelucharan Mohapatra. Kelucharan Mohapatra was the great guru of Odissi, the classical dance of Odisha, and had nothing to do with Kathakali; he was the first person from Odisha to be given the Padma Vibhushan (2000). The other three are Kathakali artists of Kerala, all trained at the Kerala Kalamandalam - the prefix 'Kalamandalam' in a dancer's name is itself the signal that the artist comes from that Kerala school. Other well-known names of Odissi are Sanjukta Panigrahi, Sonal Mansingh and Kumkum Mohanty, which is the company Kelucharan Mohapatra belongs in.

Formation of Muslim League Correct option: (b) Partition of Bengal. Lord Curzon's partition of Bengal in 1905 carved out Eastern Bengal and Assam, a province with a Muslim majority. The Swadeshi and Boycott agitation that followed aimed to undo the partition, and a section of Muslim landed leaders came to feel that they needed a political body of their own to defend that new province and to demand separate representation. That is what produced the All India Muslim League, founded on 30 December 1906 at Dhaka during the session of the Muhammadan Educational Conference, on the initiative of Nawab Salimullah Khan of Dhaka; Aga Khan III was chosen its first president. The Simla Deputation of October 1906 grew out of the same feeling, but it was a petition placed before Viceroy Lord Minto, not the cause of the League's birth. The remaining two are ruled out by date alone: the Indian Councils Act came in 1909 and the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms in 1919, both after 1906.

Social reformers Correct option: (b) Periyar EV Ramasamy. E. V. Ramasamy, honoured with the title Periyar ('the respected elder'), was born on 17 September 1879 at Erode in Tamil Nadu; the state observes his birthday every year, and 17 September 2024 was marked as Social Justice Day in his memory. He founded the Self-Respect Movement in 1925 and the Dravidar Kazhagam in 1944, campaigned against caste, untouchability and superstition, and led the Vaikom Satyagraha, for which he is remembered as Vaikom Veerar. The distractors do not fit a Tamil rationalist reformer: Dr S. Radhakrishnan (born 5 September, remembered on Teachers' Day) was a philosopher and President, Mahatma Gandhi belonged to Gujarat, and M. K. Stalin is a present-day politician.

Sectors of the economy Correct option: (d) Animal husbandry. The primary sector produces goods directly from nature - agriculture, animal husbandry, fishing, forestry, mining and quarrying - so rearing cattle, sheep and poultry belongs here. Construction is secondary, because it turns cement, steel and brick into a built product; broadcasting and real estate sell no physical good at all and are therefore services, that is, the tertiary sector. The test to apply: is the good taken straight from nature (primary), made from it (secondary), or is only a service being sold (tertiary)?

Indian Olympic medallists Correct option: (a) Wrestling. Khashaba Dadasaheb Jadhav of Maharashtra won the bronze medal in men's bantamweight freestyle wrestling at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. That made him the first athlete of independent India to win an Olympic medal in an individual event - every earlier Indian medal had been won by the men's hockey team. He was awarded the Padma Shri posthumously in 2001. Remember the sequence of Indian Olympic 'firsts': Norman Pritchard's two silvers in 1900, the hockey gold of 1928, Jadhav's individual bronze in 1952, and Abhinav Bindra's individual gold in shooting in 2008.

Awards in performing arts Correct option: (a) Vannadil Pudiyaveettil Dhananjayan and Shanta Dhananjayan. The Sangeetha Kala Vibhushan for 2020, given by the Sri Shanmukhananda Fine Arts and Sangeetha Sabha, Mumbai, went jointly to the Bharatanatyam couple V. P. Dhananjayan and Shanta Dhananjayan, known together as 'The Dhananjayans' and founders of the Bharata Kalanjali school in Chennai. The award was instituted in 2002, in the golden jubilee year of the Sabha, as its national eminence award; it carries ₹2,50,000, a citation, a gold-plated lamp, a trophy and a shawl. The other pairs are all distinguished dancers - Uma Sharma in Kathak, Yamini Krishnamurthy, Saroja Vaidyanathan and Priyadarshini Govind in Bharatanatyam - but none of them received this particular award for 2020.

Sports mascots Correct option: (d) Olly. Olly was the mascot of the FIH Men's Hockey World Cup 2023, which Odisha hosted at Bhubaneswar and Rourkela from 13 to 29 January 2023. The name is the clue to remember it by: Olly is an olive ridley turtle, the sea turtle that comes ashore in lakhs to nest at Gahirmatha and Rushikulya on the Odisha coast, so the mascot stands for the host state itself. Germany won that edition, beating Belgium 5-4 in the shoot-out after the final ended 3-3.

National symbols Correct option: (a) Jackfruit. The jackfruit - kanthal in Bengali - is the national fruit of Bangladesh. It grows easily in the country's hot, humid climate, is cheap and filling, and a single tree yields fruit for months, which is why it stands as a national symbol. Mango makes option (d) tempting because it is the national fruit of India and of Pakistan, not of Bangladesh. Bangladesh's other national symbols are the water lily (flower), the mango tree (tree) and the Royal Bengal tiger (animal); its capital is Dhaka and its currency the Bangladeshi Taka.

Types of industry Correct option: (d) Manufacturing industry. Manufacturing takes raw material and processes it into a finished, saleable product - cotton into cloth, iron ore into steel, sugarcane into sugar - and so belongs to the secondary sector, adding value at every stage. A primary industry only extracts the raw material (mining, farming, fishing, forestry); a genetic industry rears and breeds living things (nurseries, poultry farms, cattle breeding); and a service industry sells no physical product at all. The word in the question that settles it is 'transforming': only manufacturing changes the form of the material.

Periodic table position Correct option: (c) Group 5. Dubnium (Db) has atomic number 105. It is a d-block transition metal of period 7 and sits directly below tantalum, so it falls in Group 5. Read the Group 5 column downwards - V (23), Nb (41), Ta (73), Db (105) - and the place of dubnium is fixed; like the rest of the group it is expected to show the +5 oxidation state. Dubnium does not occur in nature: it is made by bombarding heavy targets in an accelerator, and its longest-lived isotope Db-268 has a half-life of only about a day, the half-life being the time in which half of a radioactive sample decays.

Five Year Plans Correct option: (b) 1990. Planning in India began with the setting up of the Planning Commission in 1950 and the First Five Year Plan in 1951; the Seventh Five Year Plan ran from 1985 to 1990, so the first seven plans came to an end in 1990. The seven plans stretch past 1985 because the sequence was broken twice by annual plans - the plan holiday of 1966-69 after the wars and the drought, and the year 1979-80. The Seventh Plan worked on the slogan 'Food, Work and Productivity'; it targeted 5 per cent growth and achieved about 6 per cent. A second plan holiday in 1990-92, caused by the balance of payments crisis, delayed the Eighth Plan to 1992.

State Legislative Council Correct option: (c) Governor. Under Article 171, $\frac{1}{6}$ of the members of a State Legislative Council (Vidhan Parishad) are nominated by the Governor from persons having special knowledge or practical experience in literature, science, art, the cooperative movement and social service. The Council itself is created or abolished under Article 169, on a resolution of the State Assembly; its total strength cannot be more than $\frac{1}{3}$ of the Assembly's strength and not less than 40. The trap here is the President: he nominates 12 members to the Rajya Sabha for exactly the same kind of eminence, but in a state Council that power belongs to the Governor. The Chief Minister and the State Election Commissioner have no role in it at all.

Gharanas of Hindustani music Correct option: (c) Rampur - Sahaswan. Ustad Rashid Khan (1968-2024) sang in the Rampur-Sahaswan gharana of Hindustani khayal. He was a great-grandson of its founder Ustad Inayat Hussain Khan and was trained by his grand-uncle Ustad Nissar Hussain Khan at Kolkata. The gharana is named after the twin seats of Rampur and Sahaswan in Uttar Pradesh, and is known for a full-throated open voice, a slow vilambit khayal and clear bol-taans; its other great names are Ustad Mushtaq Hussain Khan and Ustad Ghulam Mustafa Khan. Rashid Khan received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award and the Padma Shri in 2006 and the Padma Bhushan in 2022. The distractors belong to other lineages: Gwalior is the oldest khayal gharana, Atrauli-Jaipur is the gharana of Ustad Alladiya Khan and Kishori Amonkar, and Lucknow is known chiefly as a gharana of Kathak and of thumri.

Election Commission appointments Correct option: (d) Election Commission of India (ECI). Sukhbir Singh Sandhu, a 1988-batch IAS officer of the Uttarakhand cadre and a former Chief Secretary of that state, was appointed an Election Commissioner in March 2024 along with Gyanesh Kumar, filling both vacancies just before the 2024 Lok Sabha election, with Rajiv Kumar as Chief Election Commissioner. Theirs were the first appointments made under the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act, 2023, by a selection committee of the Prime Minister, a Union Cabinet Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha. The Election Commission is a constitutional body under Article 324, set up on 25 January 1950 - the day now observed as National Voters' Day - and has been a three-member body since 1993. An Election Commissioner holds office for six years or till the age of 65, whichever is earlier.

Festivals and communities Correct option: (d) Good Friday. Good Friday is the Friday before Easter Sunday, kept by Christians in memory of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ; it is a day of fasting, prayer and mourning rather than of celebration, and Easter Sunday two days later marks the resurrection. The other three belong to different faiths: Mahavir Jayanti marks the birth of Mahavira, the 24th Tirthankara, and is a Jain festival, while Muharram (mourning for Imam Hussain, martyred at Karbala) and Milad-un-Nabi (the birth of Prophet Muhammad) are observed by Muslims.