13 February 2025 · Shift 2

Uniform motion, acceleration Correct option: (a) is zero. Acceleration is the rate of change of velocity: $a=\frac{v-u}{t}$. Velocity has both magnitude and direction. Here the path is a straight line, so the direction never changes, and the speed is constant, so the magnitude never changes either - the velocity itself stays the same, i.e. u=v. Substituting: $a=\frac{v-u}{t}=\frac{0}{t}=0$. A positive acceleration would mean the speed is increasing and a negative one (retardation) that it is decreasing; neither happens in uniform motion, and since the data are complete the value can certainly be determined.

Kanva dynasty Correct option: (c) Vasudeva. Vasudeva Kanva was the minister of the last Shunga king Devabhuti; he killed his master in about 75 BCE and founded the Kanva (Kanvayana) dynasty with Pataliputra as its capital. The Kanvas were Brahmanas and ruled only about 45 years (c. 75-30 BCE), the last of them, Susharman, being overthrown by the Satavahanas. Pushyamitra founded the Shunga dynasty (he did not found the Kanvas), while Demetrius and Menander were Indo-Greek kings of the north-west - Menander is the Milinda of the Buddhist text Milindapanho.

Multidimensional Poverty Index Correct option: (b) Jharkhand. The National Multidimensional Poverty Index 2023 was released by NITI Aayog using NFHS-5 (2019-21) data, and among the four states offered here Jharkhand has the largest share of multidimensionally poor people, about 28.81%. Meghalaya (about 27.79%) is a close second, while Assam (about 19.35%) and West Bengal (about 11.89%) are well behind. The index measures deprivation on three equally weighted dimensions - health, education and standard of living - spread over 12 indicators, and follows the global Alkire-Foster method used by UNDP and OPHI. Remember the all-India picture too: Bihar carries the highest headcount of any state, and the national poverty ratio fell from 24.85% in 2015-16 to 14.96% in 2019-21.

Private and public goods Correct option: (c) Private. The property the question describes is called excludability: a seller can keep a non-payer away from the good. Private goods are both excludable and rival - you must buy the ticket to enter, and the seat you occupy is not available to anyone else. Public goods such as national defence or street lighting are non-excludable and non-rival, so nobody can be shut out of the benefit even if they pay nothing. Merit goods (education, healthcare) are goods the State supplies below cost because society under-consumes them; the question is about exclusion, not about subsidy, so they are not the intended answer. 'Free riders' is not a category of goods at all - it names the people who enjoy a public good without paying for it.

Appointments 2024 Correct option: (b) Amrit Mohan Prasad. Amrit Mohan Prasad, a 1989-batch IPS officer of the Odisha cadre, took charge as Director General of the Sashastra Seema Bal on 15 September 2024. The SSB is a Central Armed Police Force under the Ministry of Home Affairs; raised on 20 December 1963 (then the Special Service Bureau) after the 1962 war, it guards the Indo-Nepal and Indo-Bhutan borders and its motto is 'Service, Security and Brotherhood'. Daljit Singh Chaudhary is the wrong option to fall for: he had been holding additional charge of the SSB and in 2024 was made Director General of the Border Security Force, and Sujoy Lal Thaosen is a former DG of the SSB and CRPF.

Prarthana Samaj Correct option: (a) Atmaram Pandurang. Dr. Atmaram Pandurang Tarkhadkar founded the Prarthana Samaj at Bombay in 1867, and its work was carried forward from 1870 by M. G. Ranade and R. G. Bhandarkar. It was the Maharashtrian counterpart of the Brahmo Samaj - monotheistic worship without idols - and campaigned against caste rigidity, child marriage and the ban on widow remarriage while pressing for women's education. The other names belong elsewhere: Keshub Chandra Sen led the Brahmo Samaj of India (his visit to Bombay inspired the Prarthana Samaj), Gokhale founded the Servants of India Society in 1905, and Dadabhai Naoroji is remembered for the 'drain of wealth' theory.

Iron overload disorder Correct option: (c) hemosiderosis. When the body takes in more iron than it can use, the surplus is stored as hemosiderin - an iron-protein granule - in the liver, spleen and bone marrow; that visible overload is hemosiderosis. Repeated blood transfusions and haemolysis are its common causes. Note the difference from haemochromatosis: in hemosiderosis the iron is merely stored, while in haemochromatosis the stored iron actually damages the organ. Anaemia is the opposite state - too few red cells or too little haemoglobin, so oxygen carriage falls. Osteomalacia is softening of bone from vitamin D deficiency, and kwashiorkor is protein-deficiency malnutrition marked by oedema and a swollen belly.

Water cycle Correct option: (d) Evaporation. Solar heating turns liquid water at the surface of oceans, lakes and rivers into water vapour, which is lighter than air and rises - this change from liquid to gas below the boiling point is evaporation, the first step of the water cycle. Transpiration is the same escape of vapour but through the stomata of plant leaves, so it is limited to vegetation, not open water bodies. Condensation is the reverse change, vapour cooling back into droplets to form clouds, and precipitation is the fall of those droplets as rain, snow or hail.

Watershed development scheme Correct option: (d) 1990-91. The National Watershed Development Project for Rainfed Areas was launched in 1990-91, in the Eighth Plan period, by the Ministry of Agriculture, and it ran in 25 states and 2 Union Territories. Its unit of work is the watershed, not the individual field: contour bunding, check dams, farm ponds and afforestation are done for a whole drainage area so that rainwater is held where it falls. The aim is twofold - conserve soil and moisture in areas that have no irrigation, and raise the productivity and incomes of the farmers there. From 2000-01 the scheme was brought under the Macro Management of Agriculture mode, which is why the 2000-01 option looks tempting; the launch year, however, remains 1990-91.

The four Vedas Correct option: (d) Rigveda. The words nrti (dance) and nrtu (danseuse) occur in the Rigveda, the oldest of the four Vedas - its hymns even compare the dawn, Usha, to a brightly dressed dancer. This makes the Rigveda the earliest literary evidence of dance in India; the systematic theory of dance comes much later, in Bharata's Natyashastra. The Yajurveda is the book of sacrificial formulae, the Samaveda of melodies sung at the sacrifice, and the Atharvaveda of charms, spells and everyday remedies - none of them is the source of these two dance words.

Governors of states Correct option: (a) Telangana. Tamilisai Soundararajan, a doctor and BJP leader from Tamil Nadu, was the second Governor of Telangana from September 2019 and also held additional charge as Lieutenant Governor of Puducherry from February 2021. She resigned on 18 March 2024 to contest the Lok Sabha election from South Chennai, since Article 158 bars a Governor from holding any other office of profit or contesting while in office. Fixing the state to the person is enough here: Telangana is the only southern state in the list, and the other three - Tripura, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh - had different Governors at the time.

Fairs and festivals Correct option: (d) Gujarat. Dhrang is a village in the Bhuj taluka of Kutch district in Gujarat, and the two-day Dhrang fair is held at the samadhi of Sant Mekran Dada, the saint who with his dog Motiyo and donkey Lalio carried food and water to travellers lost in the Rann. The Kutch setting is the clue: the saint, the desert rescue story and the shrine all belong to the arid west of Gujarat, not to Punjab, Haryana or Rajasthan. Other well-known Gujarat fairs worth remembering are the Bhavnath Mahadev fair at Junagadh, the Shamlaji (Kartik Purnima) fair, the Chitra-Vichitra fair and the Madhavpur fair.

Goals of five-year plans Correct option: (c) New Technology. Modernisation, as a plan goal, means adopting new technology in place of outdated methods - hybrid seeds and machinery in farming, better plant and equipment in industry - so that more output is obtained from the same resources. It has a second, social side as well: changing the outlook of society, for instance accepting women as equal participants in work. Options (a) and (d) say the opposite of modernisation, and (b) names a particular kind of technology rather than the goal itself; the four recognised goals of Indian planning are growth, modernisation, self-reliance and equity.

Carnatic percussion Correct option: (b) mridangam. Pudukkottai Dakshinamurthy Pillai (1875-1936) was a Carnatic percussionist who played the mridangam and made the small frame drum kanjira a concert instrument; he accompanied stalwarts such as Veena Dhanammal and taught Palani Subramania Pillai. The mridangam is the principal two-headed barrel drum of Carnatic music, played with the hands, and is the rhythmic backbone of every kutcheri. The other options belong to the Hindustani tradition or to another family altogether: the sitar and tabla are north Indian instruments, and the flute is a wind instrument, not a percussion one. Other famous mridangam artists include Palghat Mani Iyer, T. K. Murthy, Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman and Karaikudi Mani.

Race Across India 2023 Correct option: (a) Kanyakumari. Race Across India, Asia's longest cycle race, was flagged off from Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir and ended at Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu in March 2023, a distance of about 3,655 km. The route is the giveaway: any 'length of India' event runs from Kashmir in the far north to Kanyakumari, the southernmost tip of the mainland, so the other three Tamil Nadu towns cannot be the finish. Of the 29 participants, Geeta Rao was the only woman and India's first differently-abled Super Randonneur.

Sports personalities Correct option: (b) Cricket. Titas Sadhu is a right-arm fast-medium bowler from Chinsurah in Bengal who plays for the India women's team and for Bengal in domestic cricket. She became widely known at the 2023 Asian Games in Hangzhou, where her spell of 3 for 6 in the final against Sri Lanka won India the gold medal and the Player of the Match award. Other Indian women cricketers to keep in mind are Mithali Raj, Jhulan Goswami, Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana and Jemimah Rodrigues.

Urbanisation in neighbouring countries Correct option: (d) Bhutan. On the Worldometer 2024 figures Bhutan has the largest urban share among these neighbours, roughly 46% of its population, ahead of the Maldives at about 42%. Nepal (about 21%) and Sri Lanka (under 20%) are far lower - Sri Lanka is in fact one of the least urbanised countries in Asia, because a great deal of settlement there is classified as rural. The reason Bhutan tops the list is its small population of under a million concentrated in a few valley towns, above all Thimphu, since the mountains leave little habitable land elsewhere. Bhutan: capital Thimphu, currency Ngultrum, landlocked in the Eastern Himalayas between China and India.

Sangeet Natak Akademi Award Correct option: (b) Kathak. Ishira and Maulik Shah are the Ahmedabad-based husband-and-wife Kathak duo of the Kadamb school, and they received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for 2018 jointly for Kathak - a joint award to a couple is itself rare. Kathak is the classical dance of north India, marked by fast footwork on ghungroos, sharp chakkars (spins) and storytelling through abhinaya; its main gharanas are Lucknow, Jaipur and Banaras. The Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, instituted in 1952, is India's highest recognition for performing artists and carries an Akademi Ratna citation, a shawl and a cash award. Well-known Kathak exponents to remember: Birju Maharaj, Shambhu Maharaj, Kumudini Lakhia, Sitara Devi and Shovana Narayan.

Fundamental rights, Article 23 Correct option: (b) Article 23. Article 23 prohibits traffic in human beings, begar and other similar forms of forced labour, and makes any contravention a punishable offence; it is the first limb of the Right against Exploitation (Articles 23-24). The right is available against private individuals as well as the State, which is why the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976 and the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956 flow from it. Article 24 is the companion provision banning employment of children below 14 in factories, mines and other hazardous work; Article 15 forbids discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, and Article 25 guarantees freedom of conscience and religion.

Zonal councils Correct option: (c) Chief Minister of the State. In each zonal council the Union Home Minister is the chairman, while the Chief Ministers of the member states act as vice-chairman by rotation, one of them holding the post for one year at a time. The five zonal councils - Northern, Central, Eastern, Western and Southern - are statutory, not constitutional, bodies set up under the States Reorganisation Act, 1956 to settle inter-state issues of economic and social planning, border and language disputes. The North Eastern Council stands apart: it was created by a separate law, the North Eastern Council Act, 1971. The Chief Secretary appears only as head of the standing committee of officials, and the Governor and the DGP hold no such rotating office.