20 February 2025 · Shift 2

Golden Globe - Naatu Naatu Correct option: (c) Rahul Sipligunj and Kalabhairava. 'Naatu Naatu' from S. S. Rajamouli's film RRR won Best Original Song at the 80th Golden Globe Awards in January 2023 - the first song from an Indian film ever to do so - and went on to win the Academy Award in the same category that year. The music is by M. M. Keeravaani and the lyrics by Chandrabose; on screen the song is danced by Ram Charan and N. T. Rama Rao Jr., while the playback voices are those of Rahul Sipligunj and Kaala Bhairava, who is Keeravaani's son. The other options simply pair well-known singers and actors of other film industries who had no part in RRR.

Fundamental Duties Correct option: (d) 11. The Fundamental Duties are listed in Article 51A of Part IVA of the Constitution. They were inserted by the 42nd Amendment Act, 1976 on the recommendation of the Swaran Singh Committee, the idea being borrowed from the Constitution of the erstwhile USSR. The 42nd Amendment gave ten duties; the eleventh - the duty of a parent or guardian to provide education to a child between six and fourteen years - was added by the 86th Amendment Act, 2002, so the total in force today is eleven. '10' is the tempting choice because that is the number originally inserted in 1976, but the question asks how many duties a citizen has now.

Basketball ring height Correct option: (b) 10'. Official NBA rules fix the upper edge of the basket ring at 10 feet, that is 3.05 m, above the floor; the ring is parallel to the floor and centred between the two vertical edges of the backboard. The ring has an inside diameter of 18 inches, and its nearest inside edge stands 6 inches from the face of the backboard. The height has stood unchanged since James Naismith nailed his peach baskets to a balcony rail 10 feet up in 1891, and FIBA uses the same figure - so 11', 12' and 13' are all wrong.

Indian Press Act, 1910 Correct option: (a) 1910. The Indian Press Act was passed in 1910, during the viceroyalty of Lord Minto II, to crush the revolutionary and extremist writing that grew after the Partition of Bengal (1905). It required every printing press and newspaper to deposit security money which the local government could forfeit, and it allowed the press to be seized and its registration cancelled for publishing 'objectionable' matter - it applied to Indian-language and English papers alike. The Act was repealed in 1921 on the recommendation of the Press Committee chaired by Tej Bahadur Sapru, so 1911, 1912 and 1913 do not fit; note also the earlier Vernacular Press Act of 1878 under Lord Lytton.

Charaka Samhita Correct option: (a) Charaka. Charaka, the physician of the Kushana court, composed the Charaka Samhita, the foundational text of Ayurvedic medicine, and it is there that the human body is stated to have 360 bones. His figure is far above the 206 bones of modern anatomy because he counted teeth, cartilages and joint surfaces as bones as well - a useful clue that the count is Ayurvedic, not modern. Patanjali is remembered for the Yoga Sutras, Chanakya for the Arthashastra and Shudraka for the play Mrichchhakatika; none of them writes on human anatomy. The surgical counterpart of Charaka is Sushruta, who is not among the options.

Role of microfinance Correct option: (d) Offering financial services to the low-income group. Microfinance institutions exist to serve exactly those customers an ordinary bank turns away - small farmers, artisans, street vendors and above all women's self-help groups - by lending small, collateral-free sums and adding savings, insurance and remittance facilities. Their aim is financial inclusion and self-employment, so an option that points to high-income customers, to foreigners, or to other financial institutions describes commercial or wholesale banking instead. Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh, who built the Grameen Bank on this idea, shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006; in India these lenders work mainly as NBFC-MFIs under the RBI.

Election Commissioner 2024 Correct option: (a) Sukhbir Singh Sandhu. Sukhbir Singh Sandhu, a 1988-batch IAS officer of the Uttarakhand cadre, took charge as Election Commissioner on 15 March 2024 along with Gyanesh Kumar, filling the two vacancies in the Commission just before the 2024 Lok Sabha election. Under Article 324(2) the President appoints the Chief Election Commissioner and the other Election Commissioners; since the 2023 Act the names are recommended by a committee of the Prime Minister, a Union Cabinet Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha. The Election Commission of India was set up on 25 January 1950, the day now observed as National Voters' Day, and works from Nirvachan Sadan, New Delhi; Rajiv Kumar was the Chief Election Commissioner at the time of this appointment. The other three names are invented.

Goals of Five-Year Plans Correct option: (b) Self-reliance. The four long-term goals laid down for India's Five-Year Plans were growth, modernisation, self-reliance and equity. Self-reliance meant depending on our own resources and avoiding the import of goods that could be produced at home; the first seven plans pressed it hard in food grains and heavy industry, because dependence on foreign supplies was seen as a threat to sovereignty. The other three are ordinary look-alike words - self-achievable, self-confidence, self-motivation - that never appear as planning objectives, which is why only self-reliance can be the answer.

Interpreter of the Constitution Correct option: (b) Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is the final interpreter and guardian of the Constitution: the law it declares binds every court in India, and any law that clashes with the Fundamental Rights is void once the Court says so. Parliament makes and amends the Constitution, but ever since Kesavananda Bharati (1973) even an amendment is tested by the Court against the basic structure - so the last word on what the Constitution means lies with the Court, not with Parliament, the Lok Sabha or the President. The President may seek the Court's opinion on a question of law under Article 143, which again shows where the authority to interpret rests.

Polar hydroxyl group Correct option: (b) Alcohols. The group described is the hydroxyl group, -OH, which is what defines an alcohol. Oxygen is much more electronegative than hydrogen, so the shared pair sits closer to oxygen, leaving a partial negative charge on O and a partial positive charge on H. That unsymmetrical distribution of charge is exactly what 'polar' means, and it lets alcohols form hydrogen bonds - which is why ethanol mixes with water while a hydrocarbon of similar size does not. Ethers (R-O-R) and esters contain oxygen but have no O-H bond at all, and a carboxylic acid is named for the carboxyl group -COOH - a hydroxyl attached to a carbonyl - not for the plain hydroxyl group the question describes.

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan Correct option: (d) Gandhi Jayanti. The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 2 October 2014 - Gandhi Jayanti - and its cleanliness drives are held on that day every year. The date was chosen because sanitation was a cause dear to Mahatma Gandhi; the mission's logo is a pair of his spectacles, and its target was a clean, open-defecation-free India by 2 October 2019, his 150th birth anniversary. Republic Day and Independence Day are the other two national days, but no cleanliness campaign is tied to them, and New Year is not an Indian national festival at all.

Olympic badminton events Correct option: (a) 5. Olympic badminton carries five medal events. Singles and doubles for men and for women make four, and mixed doubles is the fifth; there is no team event at the Olympics, unlike the Thomas Cup and the Uber Cup. Badminton became a full medal sport at Barcelona 1992 with four events, and mixed doubles was added at Atlanta 1996 - India's Olympic medals in the sport, by Saina Nehwal and P. V. Sindhu, have come in women's singles.

Nrityanjali film festival Correct option: (d) 2020. The first part of 'Nrityanjali', an online film festival on Indian classical dance and its maestros, was organised by the Films Division of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in September 2020. It was held online because of the COVID-19 restrictions of that year: documentaries on Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Odissi, Kathakali and on masters such as Birju Maharaj, Maya Rao and Mrinalini Sarabhai were streamed free on the Films Division website and its YouTube channel. 2001 and 2012 are ruled out because an online festival of this kind belongs to the streaming era, and 2024 is ruled out because the Films Division had by then (2022) been merged into the National Film Development Corporation and could not have run the first edition.

Harry Messel Award 2024 Correct option: (a) Species Survival Commission. Bibhab Kumar Talukdar - the Assam-based rhino biologist who heads the organisation Aaranyak and chairs the IUCN Asian Rhino Specialist Group - received the Harry Messel Award for Conservation Leadership in October 2024. The award is given by the Species Survival Commission (SSC) of the IUCN, the world's largest volunteer network of species experts, and it was presented at the 5th IUCN SSC Leaders' Meeting held in Abu Dhabi. It is named after Professor Harry Messel, the physicist whose crocodile research programme in northern Australia helped save the saltwater crocodile, and it honours outstanding leadership in species conservation. The other three names do not exist: of the IUCN's six commissions, only the Species Survival Commission deals with the survival status of species, so 'Biodiversity Observation', 'Species Observational' and 'Animal Survival' Commission are all invented.

Fourth Five-Year Plan Correct option: (d) Fourth Plan. The Fourth Five-Year Plan ran from 1969 to 1974 with the twin aims of 'growth with stability' and progressive achievement of self-reliance. The Bangladesh liberation struggle of 1971 pushed about ten million refugees into eastern India, and money meant for development had to be diverted to relief and to the war with Pakistan; a failed monsoon and the 1973 oil shock did the rest, so the plan fell far short of its growth target. The Fifth Plan (1974-79) began after that crisis was over, while the Second (1956-61) and Sixth (1980-85) Plans belong to entirely different decades.

Sex ratio, Census 2011 Correct option: (d) Daman. In Census 2011 the district of Daman, in the then Union Territory of Daman & Diu, recorded a sex ratio of 533 females per 1000 males - the lowest of any district in India. The figure is so low because Daman's industrial estates draw a very large, almost entirely male, migrant workforce, which swells the male count of a small district. The same migration effect makes Chandigarh (818) and Surat (788) low as well, and Kargil's ratio is higher still, but none of them comes anywhere near as low as 533 - so Daman is the least. For reference, India's overall sex ratio in 2011 was 943, with Kerala the highest state (1084) and Mahe the highest district (1176).

Right to work - MGNREGA Correct option: (b) Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. MGNREGA, passed in 2005 and in force from February 2006, turns the 'right to work' into a legal guarantee: every rural household whose adult members volunteer for unskilled manual work must get at least 100 days of wage employment in a financial year. If work is not provided within 15 days of the demand, the applicant is entitled to an unemployment allowance - this enforceable claim is what makes it a rights-based law and not merely a scheme. The Employees' Provident Funds Act deals with retirement savings in the organised sector, the Citizenship Act with acquiring and losing Indian citizenship, and the IIM Act with the governance of the IIMs; none of them guarantees employment.

Natya Kalajyoti Award Correct option: (c) Bharatanatyam. Sarayu Sai was honoured with the Natya Kalajyoti Award in 2006 for her work in Bharatanatyam, the classical dance form of Tamil Nadu. Bharatanatyam grew out of the temple dance of the devadasis and follows the grammar of Bharata's Natya Shastra; it is recognised at once by the araimandi - the half-sitting stance with knees turned out - by its crisp adavus and by the expressive abhinaya of its solo pieces such as the varnam. The other three options are the classical dances of other regions - Kuchipudi of Andhra Pradesh, Kathak of north India and Odissi of Odisha - so none of them is the style for which this award was given to her.

Diploblastic body layers Correct option: (a) Mesoglea. Diploblastic animals - the cnidarians such as Hydra, jellyfish and sea anemones - have only two true embryonic germ layers, an outer ectoderm and an inner endoderm. Between the two lies a jelly-like layer that is largely non-cellular and undifferentiated: the mesoglea. Because it does not arise as a germ layer it is never counted as a third layer, and such animals therefore have tissues but no true organs. Endoderm and ectoderm are the two embryonic layers themselves, so neither can be the undifferentiated layer between them, and protoderm belongs to botany - it is the outermost primary meristem of a root or shoot tip, not an animal layer at all.

Limestone - sedimentary rock Correct option: (a) Limestone. Limestone is a sedimentary rock made chiefly of calcium carbonate, $CaC{O}_3$, in its two crystal forms - calcite and aragonite. Most of it builds up on shallow sea floors from the shells, corals and skeletal debris of marine organisms. Marble is the trap: its chemistry is the same, but it is the metamorphic rock that forms when limestone is recrystallised by heat and pressure, so it is not a sedimentary rock. Feldspar and garnet are not rocks at all but minerals - feldspar an aluminosilicate that makes up much of the igneous rocks, garnet a silicate typical of metamorphic rocks.