10 February 2025 · Shift 2

Census 2011 population density Correct option: (d) 382 persons per ${\mathrm{km}}^2$. Population density $=\frac{\mathrm{total}\mathrm{population}}{\mathrm{total}\mathrm{area}}$, and the Census of 2011 counted 121.09 crore people living on 32.87 lakh ${\mathrm{km}}^2$, which gives about 382 persons per ${\mathrm{km}}^2$. The figure had risen from 325 in 2001, a gain of 57 persons per ${\mathrm{km}}^2$ in one decade; among the States, Bihar was the most densely populated and Arunachal Pradesh the least. Memory hook for Census 2011 - density 382, sex ratio 943, literacy $74.04\%$; its motto was "Our Census, Our Future".

Classical dance forms Correct option: (d) Kathakali. Kathakali, the dance-drama of Kerala, is the form in which all four kinds of abhinaya - angika (body), aharya (costume and make-up), vachika (word and song) and satvika (emotion) - are fused with nritta (pure dance), nritya (expressive dance) and natya (drama). That is why it is called complete theatre: the towering headgear and green chutti make-up supply aharya, the singers behind the actor supply vachika, and the actor's eyes and hands carry angika and satvika through all-night Ramayana and Mahabharata episodes. The other three are classical forms too, but they are identified with other regions and do not combine all seven elements in this way.

PMEGP launch year Correct option: (a) 2008. The Prime Minister's Employment Generation Programme (PMEGP) was launched on 15 August 2008 by the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises. It is a credit-linked subsidy scheme: the bank lends, and the Government pays a margin-money subsidy of 15-35% for setting up a micro-enterprise in the non-farm sector, the higher rates going to women, SC/ST and rural beneficiaries. KVIC is the national nodal agency, while State KVIBs and the District Industries Centres implement it on the ground. Memory hook: PMEGP is the 2008 merger of two older schemes - PMRY (1993) and REGP (1995).

Joint Parcel Product 2022 Correct option: (c) Indian Railways and India Post. The Joint Parcel Product (JPP), taken up in 2022, is a partnership in which the Department of Posts does the first-mile pick-up and the last-mile delivery while the Railways carries the consignment station to station. It was announced as the country's first door-to-door parcel and freight service of its kind, joining the post office's reach in every pin code to the Railways' cheap long-haul capacity. A single ministry acting alone cannot provide that combination, which rules out (a) and (b); and Indian Airlines ceased to exist as a separate carrier after its 2011 merger into Air India, which rules out (d).

Right to freedom of religion Correct option: (d) Article 25. Article 25 gives every person freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion, subject only to public order, morality, health and the other Fundamental Rights. Articles 25 to 28 together make up the Right to Freedom of Religion: 25 is the individual's right, 26 belongs to religious denominations, 27 bars religious taxes and 28 bars religious instruction in wholly State-funded institutions.

Bharatiya Vayuyan Adhiniyam 2024 Correct option: (b) Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA). The Bharatiya Vayuyan Vidheyak, 2024 replaced the ninety-year-old Aircraft Act, 1934 and gives statutory status to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, the body that frames and enforces the safety and regulatory standards of civil aviation. The DGCA licenses pilots and engineers, certifies aircraft and airlines and audits airports, so it is the regulator; the Bill also recognises the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security and the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, but their work is security and post-accident inquiry, not regulation. Memory hook: DGCA regulates, BCAS secures, AAIB investigates - and an 'Investigation Committee' as in option (a) is not a body created by this law at all.

Music composer of 'Naatu Naatu' Correct option: (b) MM Keeravani. MM Keeravani composed 'Naatu Naatu' for S.S. Rajamouli's RRR (2022); it won the Golden Globe in January 2023 and then the Academy Award for Best Original Song in March 2023 - the first song from an Indian film to win an Oscar. The lyrics were written by Chandrabose and it was sung by Rahul Sipligunj and Kaala Bhairava; Keeravani was awarded the Padma Shri in 2023. AR Rahman is a composer too, but his Oscars came in 2009 for Slumdog Millionaire, while SP Balasubrahmanyam and KJ Yesudas are celebrated playback singers rather than the composer asked for here.

Monsoon storms on the east coast Correct option: (a) Odisha. In the height of the south-west monsoon the Ganga delta and the coastal plains of Odisha are struck by rain-bearing tropical depressions almost every third or fifth day in July and August. These depressions form over the head of the Bay of Bengal and move north-westwards on to the coast, so it is the north-eastern seaboard - West Bengal and Odisha - that receives them, not the Arabian Sea coast of Gujarat or Maharashtra. Tamil Nadu is the standing exception on the east coast: it lies in the rain shadow of the south-west monsoon and gets most of its rain from the retreating north-east monsoon in October-December.

Edicts of Ashoka Correct option: (b) 33. The Edicts of Ashoka are a body of 33 inscriptions - the Major and Minor Rock Edicts, the Pillar Edicts and a few cave inscriptions - issued by the Mauryan emperor between about 268 and 232 BCE. They are spread across present-day India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, and are written mostly in Prakrit in the Brahmi script, with Kharosthi, Greek and Aramaic used in the north-west. They are the earliest deciphered writing of India and the first firm evidence of Ashoka's dhamma and the spread of Buddhism; James Prinsep deciphered the Brahmi of these edicts in 1837.

Cytosol of the cell Correct option: (a) hyaloplasm. Cytoplasm minus all its organelles is the clear, semi-fluid ground substance called the cytosol, whose older name is hyaloplasm; it is present in prokaryotic as well as eukaryotic cells and is the site of glycolysis. Lysosome is itself a membrane-bound organelle full of digestive enzymes, so it cannot be the organelle-free fluid; nucleoplasm is the fluid inside the nucleus, which prokaryotes do not possess at all. Protoplasm is the whole living content of the cell - cytoplasm plus nucleus - and so is much wider than what the question describes. Memory hook: hyalo- means 'glassy', the clear part of the cell that is left when every solid structure is taken out.

Harvest festivals of India Correct option: (a) Tamil Nadu. Uzhavar Thirunal literally means 'the farmers' festival' - uzhavar is Tamil for farmer - and it is the day of the four-day Pongal harvest festival of Tamil Nadu that honours the cultivator, celebrated in mid-January. The name itself is the give-away: it is Tamil, so it can only belong to Tamil Nadu, whereas Kerala's harvest festival is Onam and Telangana's flower festival is Bathukamma.

NTEP principal advisor Correct option: (d) Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. In July 2024 the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare appointed Prof. (Dr.) Soumya Swaminathan as Principal Advisor to the National Tuberculosis Elimination Programme (NTEP). She is a paediatrician and tuberculosis researcher who served as Chief Scientist of the World Health Organization from 2019 to 2022 and earlier as Director-General of the ICMR. Every national disease-control programme, the NTEP included, is run by MoHFW, so ministries dealing with housing, internal security or child care would never make such an appointment.

Rolling Plan 1978-1983 Correct option: (d) Focus on economic crisis management and policy adjustments. The Janata Party government ended the Fifth Plan a year early and adopted a Rolling Plan for 1978-1983, which lasted until the Sixth Plan was restarted in 1980. In a rolling plan the targets are reviewed and rewritten every single year in the light of that year's performance, so the plan is a device for managing an unstable economy - high inflation and food and foreign-exchange pressure - by adjusting policy continuously instead of freezing five-year targets. The idea is credited to the economist Gunnar Myrdal; its weakness was exactly its flexibility, since targets that changed every year made long-term investment planning difficult. The other options name the themes of regular Five-Year Plans - growth with social justice, employment and regional balance, agriculture and industry - not the reason a rolling plan was resorted to.

UNESCO intangible heritage Correct option: (a) Sankirtana. Sankirtana - the ritual singing, drumming and dancing of the Vaishnava community of the Manipur plains - was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013. A performance uses the pung (barrel drum) and cymbals, and it marks temple festivals as well as the life-cycle events of birth, marriage and death, which is why UNESCO described it as binding the community together. Maibi dance and Ras Lila are Manipuri forms as well but were not the 2013 inscription, and a cymbal is only an instrument used within Sankirtana, not a dance-and-song form.

Seventh Schedule lists Correct option: (d) Concurrent List. Article 246 read with the Seventh Schedule divides legislative power into three lists, and the Concurrent List is the one on which both Parliament and the State legislatures may make law - education, forests, criminal law and procedure, marriage and adoption are on it. If a Central and a State law on a concurrent subject conflict, Article 254 makes the Central law prevail; and there is no 'Residual List' at all - Article 248 simply gives the residuary power to Parliament.

Newton's law of gravitation Correct option: (a) 0.667 N. Formulas needed: volume of a sphere $V=\frac{4}{3}\pi R^3$, mass $m=\rho V$, and Newton's law $F=\frac{G{m}^2}{d^2}$ for two equal masses. Volume of each ball: $V=\frac{4}{3}\pi {\left(1\right)}^3=\frac{4\pi }{3}$. Mass of each ball: $m=\rho V=\frac{3}{2\pi }\times {10}^5\times \frac{4\pi }{3}=2\times {10}^5$ kg. The balls touch each other, so the distance between their centres is d=R+R=2 m. Substituting: $F=\frac{6.67\times {10}^{-11}\times {\left(2\times {10}^5\right)}^2}{{\left(2\right)}^2}=\frac{6.67\times {10}^{-11}\times 4\times {10}^{10}}{4}$. $F=6.67\times {10}^{-11}\times {10}^{10}=6.67\times {10}^{-1}=0.667$ N. Note how the $\pi$ in the density cancels the $\pi$ in the volume - that is the hint that the density was written as $\frac{3}{2\pi }\times {10}^5$ in the first place.

Archery scoring Correct option: (c) 10. A World Archery target face carries ten concentric scoring rings; the innermost gold ring, the bull's-eye, scores the maximum of 10 points for one arrow, and the outermost white ring scores 1. The colours run outwards in pairs from the centre - gold 10 and 9, red 8 and 7, blue 6 and 5, black 4 and 3, white 2 and 1 - so an arrow can never score more than 10. Olympic recurve archery is shot at 70 m on a 122 cm face; Indian archers worth remembering are Deepika Kumari, Tarundeep Rai, Harvinder Singh and Sheetal Devi.

Plan Holiday 1966-69 Correct option: (b) Failure of the Third Five-Year Plan. The Third Plan (1961-66) collapsed under the war with China in 1962, the war with Pakistan in 1965 and the severe drought and famine of 1965-66, and its targets were badly missed. So instead of starting a Fourth Plan the government ran three Annual Plans - 1966-67, 1967-68 and 1968-69 - and this three-year gap is the Plan Holiday; the Fourth Five-Year Plan finally began in 1969. Those years saw the rupee devalued (1966) and prices rising sharply, that is inflation and not deflation, which rules out (c); and economic liberalisation came far later, in 1991.

Ultimate Kho Kho League Correct option: (d) Cuttack. The final of Season 2 of the Ultimate Kho Kho League was played on 13 January 2024 at the Jawaharlal Nehru Indoor Stadium in Cuttack, Odisha, where the Gujarat Giants beat the Chennai Quick Guns 31-26 to take their first title. Ultimate Kho Kho, launched in 2022 under the Kho Kho Federation of India, is the country's first franchise-based kho-kho league. Memory hook: Season 1 was played at Pune and won by the Odisha Juggernauts; Season 2 moved to Cuttack and was won by the Gujarat Giants.

Reorganisation of the INA Correct option: (b) Singapore. The Azad Hind Fauj was first raised at Singapore in 1942 by Captain Mohan Singh with the help of Rash Behari Bose, but it was soon disbanded; Subhas Chandra Bose reached Singapore in July 1943, took command on 4 July 1943 and reorganised the force. From Singapore he gave the calls of 'Dilli Chalo' and 'Jai Hind', raised the Rani Jhansi Regiment of women soldiers under Captain Lakshmi Sahgal, and on 21 October 1943 proclaimed the Provisional Government of Azad Hind. Germany is where Bose had earlier formed the Indian Legion, Japan supplied arms and Burma provided the battlefields of Imphal and Kohima in 1944 - but the reorganisation itself took place at Singapore.