IBPS GK Questions 2026

The correct answer is B, Niccolo Machiavelli, the Florentine diplomat whose short book advises a ruler on how power is actually gained and kept rather than how it ought to be used; his name gave English the adjective machiavellian.

The correct answer is B, Homer, the Greek poet to whom both epics are traditionally credited: the Iliad on the anger of Achilles during the siege of Troy, and the Odyssey on the ten year voyage of Odysseus back to Ithaca.

The correct answer is A, Jane Austen, whose novel of the Bennet sisters, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy opens with one of the best known first lines in English; she also wrote Emma, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion.

The novel follows a poor student in St Petersburg who kills a pawnbroker, convinces himself that extraordinary men stand above the law, and is then broken by his own conscience; Dostoevsky also wrote The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov.

The correct answer is A, Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet of Florence whose long poem carries the narrator through hell, purgatory and paradise in three parts, and which helped make the Tuscan dialect into modern Italian.

Animal Farm is a short allegory in which farm animals overthrow their owner and the pigs take his place, and Nineteen Eighty-Four gave the language the words Big Brother, thought police and doublethink.

The short novel tells of an ageing Cuban fisherman who hooks a giant marlin far out at sea and fights to bring it home; Hemingway also wrote A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The correct answer is C, Victor Hugo, the French novelist, poet and dramatist whose Les Miserables follows the convict Jean Valjean through the France of the early nineteenth century, and whose The Hunchback of Notre-Dame made the cathedral of Paris a character in its own right.

The correct answer is A, Miguel de Cervantes, the Spanish writer whose tale of an elderly gentleman who reads too many books of chivalry, takes up a lance and rides out with his squire Sancho Panza is regarded as the first modern novel in Europe.

The Russian novelist set War and Peace against the invasion of Russia by Napoleon, following several families through war and peace alike, and he also wrote Anna Karenina, the other title always paired with his name.

The index counts a household as poor when it suffers deprivation in enough of the indicators grouped under these three heads, such as nutrition and child mortality under health, years of schooling and attendance under education, and cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and assets under standard of living.

The head count ratio simply counts how many people fall below the line and divides that by the total population, which makes it easy to understand and easy to compare across states.

Begun in 2017, it replaced the five-yearly employment and unemployment surveys and gives annual estimates for rural and urban areas together along with more frequent estimates for urban areas, using the usual status and current weekly status measures.

This measure notes what the person did in each half day of the seven days before the survey, so every day of idleness is counted; because it picks up short spells that the longer reference periods miss, it yields the highest estimate of unemployment of the three.

Agriculture needs labour at sowing, transplanting and harvest and very little in between, and industries tied to a crop, such as sugar mills and rice mills, work only for part of the year, so the workers attached to them are idle for the remaining months.

The task force of 1979 fixed the rural line at the consumption expenditure needed to obtain 2,400 calories a day, on the ground that rural work involves more physical labour.

The Tendulkar expert group reported in 2009, moved away from the calorie anchor, used a mixed reference period for consumption and brought private spending on health and education into the basket, which raised the estimated share of the poor.

The Act, passed in 2005, gives every rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work a legal right to one hundred days of wage employment in a financial year, and if work is not provided within the prescribed period the applicant becomes entitled to an unemployment allowance.

Here the extra workers appear to be employed but their marginal contribution to output is close to zero, which is why the condition is called disguised or hidden; the classic Indian example is a family farm on which several members work a plot that two could manage.

In the standard classification the churning poor are those whose consumption crosses the poverty line and falls back below it again and again, the typical cases being small and marginal farmers and casual labourers whose earnings depend on the season.