12 February 2025 · Shift 3

Article 1 - Union of States Article 1 of the Constitution opens with the words "India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States", so the constitutional description of India is a Union of States. Dr Ambedkar explained the choice of the word: the States did not come together by an agreement, and no State has the right to break away from the Union. A federation or a confederation is formed by a pact between units that may bargain or secede, and the Commonwealth is a grouping of independent countries - none of them fits Article 1. Hence the correct option is (d).

Classical dance - Bharatanatyam The Thanjavur Quartet - the four brothers Chinnayya, Ponnayya, Sivanandam and Vadivelu - served the Maratha court of Thanjavur in the early 19th century. They rescued the temple dance of Tamil Nadu and fixed the order of its recital - alarippu, jatiswaram, shabdam, varnam, padam, tillana - and that margam is still the format of a Bharatanatyam performance today. The clue that decides the option is the region: the Quartet worked in Thanjavur, so only the Tamil dance can be theirs - Mohiniattam and Kathakali belong to Kerala and Kathak to north India. Hence the correct option is (a).

One Nation, One Poll committee The High-Level Committee on Simultaneous Elections was constituted in September 2023 under former President Ram Nath Kovind; it gave its report in March 2024 and the Union Cabinet accepted the recommendations in September 2024. The scheme it proposes is two-staged - Lok Sabha and all State Assemblies polled together first, and local body elections held within 100 days of that - with one common electoral roll and one voter ID prepared by the Election Commission. The 129th Constitution Amendment Bill, 2024 was introduced to carry it out. Justice D. Y. Chandrachud was Chief Justice of India and Ashwini Vaishnaw the minister who announced the Cabinet decision - announcing is not proposing; Pratibha Patil, a former President, had no role in it. Hence the correct option is (c).

Tribal festivals of Nagaland All three names belong to Nagaland: Yemshe is the pre-harvest festival of the Pochury tribe, Tokhu Emong the post-harvest festival of the Lotha Nagas, and Bushu is kept by the Dimasa Kachari people of the Dhansiri valley. Nagaland has a festival for almost every tribe because each tribe follows its own farming calendar; the Hornbill Festival at Kisama in December gathers all of them, which is why Nagaland is called the land of festivals. Losar, Solung and Nyokum are Arunachali, Sarhul and Karma are of Jharkhand, and Saga Dawa is Sikkimese - so no other option carries this set of three. Hence the correct option is (a).

Palaeolithic evidence in India Pieces of ostrich eggshell, several of them engraved with cross-hatched designs, were excavated at Patne in Maharashtra and at sites in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. They are dated to roughly 40,000-25,000 years ago, which places the Indian ostrich squarely in the Upper Palaeolithic - the age of stone tools, before any farming. The Epipalaeolithic (Mesolithic) with its microliths, the Neolithic with farming and the Chalcolithic with copper are all later ages, so the eggshell evidence is older than every other option. Hence the correct option is (a).

FIFA U-17 Women's World Cup 2022 The 7th FIFA U-17 Women's World Cup was hosted by India from 11 to 30 October 2022 - the first FIFA women's tournament ever held in the country. It was played at three venues: Kalinga Stadium, Bhubaneswar (Odisha); Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, Fatorda, Margao (Goa); and DY Patil Stadium, Navi Mumbai (Maharashtra). Spain beat Colombia 1-0 in the final at Navi Mumbai; the number of venues, three, is what the blank asks for. Hence the correct option is (c).

Powers of the Governor Issuing a writ is a judicial power, and the Constitution gives it only to the courts - to the Supreme Court under Article 32 and to the High Courts under Article 226. No executive authority, the Governor included, can issue one. The Governor is the executive head of the State, so the other three powers are all his: legislative (summoning, proroguing and dissolving the House, addressing it, and promulgating ordinances under Article 213), financial (no money bill may be introduced and no State Budget laid without his recommendation), and discretionary. Discretion is real and often examined - choosing a Chief Minister when no party has a majority, withholding assent, and reserving a Bill for the President under Article 200 - so options (b), (c) and (d) are powers he does hold. Hence the correct option is (a).

Biome and ecological levels A biome is a large geographic unit made of many separate but similar ecosystems that share one climate, and therefore one broad type of vegetation and animal life - tundra, taiga, desert, grassland, tropical rainforest. The word the question needs is the one that sits between ecosystem and biosphere on that ladder: an ecosystem is a single community with its habitat (smaller than a biome), the biosphere is the whole living layer of the Earth (larger), and an organism is one living being. Hence the correct option is (d).

Third Five-Year Plan The Third Five-Year Plan (1961-66) set out to make the economy 'self-reliant and self-generating' and targeted a growth rate of about 5.6 per cent. It was broken by three shocks together - the Chinese aggression of 1962, the Indo-Pak war of 1965 and the severe drought of 1965-66 - which pushed money from development into defence and food imports, and growth ended at barely 2.4 per cent. Planning was then suspended for three Annual Plans, the 'Plan Holiday' of 1966-69, before the Fourth Plan began. The First Plan met its target, the Second built heavy industry, and the Fifth was cut short in 1978 by a change of government, not by a war. Hence the correct option is (d).

National MPI 2021 India's first National Multidimensional Poverty Index, released by NITI Aayog in November 2021, follows the global Alkire-Foster method but adds two indicators of its own - maternal health and bank account - to the global ten. So it measures three equally weighted dimensions through 12 indicators in all. A household is counted as multidimensionally poor when it is deprived in at least one-third of the weighted indicators; Bihar recorded the highest headcount ratio and Kerala the lowest. Hence the correct option is (c).

Balanced budget A government budget is the statement of what the government expects to earn and what it expects to spend in a financial year, so a balanced budget compares those two of its own figures. Condition: $\mathrm{Total}\mathrm{government}\mathrm{revenue}=\mathrm{Total}\mathrm{government}\mathrm{expenditure}$, which makes the deficit zero. If expenditure exceeds revenue the budget is a deficit budget, and if revenue exceeds expenditure it is a surplus budget. Private revenue and private expenditure belong to households and firms, not to the budget, and investment is only one part of government expenditure - so equating revenue with investment still leaves the rest of the spending unmatched. Hence the correct option is (a).

Asian Games 2023 - youngest medallist At the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou (September-October 2023), India's youngest medallist was the roller skater Sanjana Bathula, aged 15 years, 3 months and 11 days on the day of her medal. She was in the women's 3000 m relay speed-skating team that took bronze - India's first ever Asian Games medal in roller skating. The option that has to be ruled out carefully is Anahat Singh: she was also 15, but a few months older than Sanjana, so 'youngest' still belongs to Sanjana. Parul Chaudhary (athletics) and Annu Rani (javelin) were both in their late twenties at these Games, where India won a record 107 medals. Hence the correct option is (b).

Sattriya dance and Assam Sattriya, written Xatriya in Assamese, grew inside the Vaishnava monasteries called sattras that Srimanta Sankaradeva founded in the 15th century, and it is the classical dance of Assam. Garima Hazarika, an exponent of both Sattriya and Odissi and a Sangeet Natak Akademi awardee, belongs to Assam. The half of the clue that decides the State is Sattriya, not Odissi: Odissi is taught and performed all over India, so 'Odisha' is the trap here, while Sattriya is practised only in the Assamese sattra tradition. The Sangeet Natak Akademi, set up in 1953 with its headquarters in New Delhi, is India's national academy for music, dance and drama. Hence the correct option is (c).

Census 2011 - ST share Census 2011 counted about 10.43 crore Scheduled Tribes in a total population of about 121.06 crore. Share $=\frac{10.43}{121.06}\times 100\approx 8.6\%$ Keep the pair together: Scheduled Tribes 8.6 per cent and Scheduled Castes 16.6 per cent in the same Census - 8.2 is only a near-miss distractor. Madhya Pradesh has the largest tribal population in absolute numbers, while Mizoram and Lakshadweep have the highest tribal share within a State or UT. Hence the correct option is (b).

Primary industry Primary industries draw their material straight from nature - farming, fishing, forestry, mining, quarrying and oil extraction - and add almost no processing, which is why they are called extractive or nature-oriented industries. Manufacturing is secondary: it turns those raw materials into finished goods, so human intervention is the whole of it. Service industries are tertiary and handle no material at all. Genetic industries are the tempting option because they too deal with living things, but they rear and multiply plants and animals under close human care - nurseries, hatcheries, cattle breeding - which is the opposite of 'minimal human intervention'. Hence the correct option is (a).

Tropical climate zone The tropical zone lies between the Tropic of Cancer (${23.5}^{\circ }$ N) and the Tropic of Capricorn (${23.5}^{\circ }$ S), where the sun is nearly overhead all through the year. That gives high temperature, heavy convectional rainfall and high humidity with almost no seasonal swing - the climate of the Amazon basin, the Congo basin and South-East Asia, and the reason these belts carry dense evergreen rainforest. The word that separates the options is 'humid': a desert is hot but dry, a temperate zone has four marked seasons, and polar regions are cold all year - none of them is hot and humid together. Hence the correct option is (a).

Straight-chain alkane - butane An alkane with 4 carbon atoms has the formula $C_4{H}_{10}$, and the unbranched member of that formula is n-butane: $C{H}_3-C{H}_2-C{H}_2-C{H}_3$. Isobutane has the very same formula $C_4{H}_{10}$, so the count of carbons cannot separate it - what rules it out is the branch: its fourth carbon hangs off the middle carbon instead of continuing the line. 2-Methylbutane is $C_5{H}_{12}$ and 2,3-dimethylbutane is $C_6{H}_{14}$, so both fail the 4-carbon test as well as the straight-chain test. Butane liquefies under mild pressure and vaporises easily, which is why it serves both as lighter and LPG fuel and as an aerosol propellant. Hence the correct option is (c).

Chief Minister of Delhi Arvind Kejriwal resigned in September 2024 and Atishi Marlena of the Aam Aadmi Party was sworn in as the 8th Chief Minister of Delhi on 21 September 2024. She was the third woman to hold the office, after Sushma Swaraj and Sheila Dikshit, and the youngest Chief Minister Delhi has had. Kejriwal was the outgoing Chief Minister, and Sanjay Singh and Manish Sisodia were party colleagues who did not take the chair. Rekha Gupta of the BJP became the 9th Chief Minister on 20 February 2025, so 'September 2024' in the question fixes Atishi as the answer. Hence the correct option is (a).

Musical instrument - Sarod Arnab Chakrabarty is a Hindustani classical sarod player trained in the Shahjahanpur gharana. The sarod is a fretless plucked string instrument of the lute family with a polished metal fingerboard and a goatskin-covered wooden body, which gives it its deep, sliding tone. Its best known names are Allauddin Khan, Ali Akbar Khan, Hafiz Ali Khan, Amjad Ali Khan and Buddhadev Das Gupta. The other options are different families altogether: the sarangi is bowed, the mridangam is a percussion instrument of Carnatic music, and the surbahar is the bass sitar - a fretted instrument, unlike the fretless sarod. Hence the correct option is (d).

Tattwabodhini Sabha The Tattwabodhini Sabha was founded in Calcutta in 1839 by Debendranath Tagore, the father of Rabindranath Tagore. It began as a study circle on the Upanishads, spread rational enquiry and modern education through its journal Tattwabodhini Patrika, and in 1843 merged with the Brahmo Samaj, which Debendranath then led after Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Keshab Chandra Sen joined the Brahmo Samaj much later and split it in 1866; Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar was a member of the Sabha but not its founder; Swami Vivekananda, born in 1863, founded the Ramakrishna Mission in 1897. Hence the correct option is (a).