Indian Economy GK Questions with Answers – Page 43

Capital goods are machines, plant and equipment that are bought not to be consumed but to produce other goods, and a firm orders them only when it expects demand to grow enough to justify adding capacity.

The IIP compares the physical quantity of goods produced in a month with the quantity produced in the base year, taking a weighted average of those quantity relatives, so it rises only when more is actually made and is untouched by a change in prices.

Primary goods in this classification are the output of mining, crude oil and natural gas extraction and electricity generation, that is goods that enter production before any manufacturing has been done to them, so the category naturally carries the largest share.

The eight core industries are coal, crude oil, natural gas, refinery products, fertilisers, steel, cement and electricity, so options A, B and D are all on the list.

Fertiliser output is important for agriculture and is watched before every sowing season, but the value of the industry's production is small beside refining or steel, which is why its weight is light and a big percentage swing in fertilisers barely moves the combined index.

Refining turns crude oil into petrol, diesel, kerosene, naphtha and feedstock for chemicals, and the value of that output is so large that a shutdown at a big refinery shows up in the national figure.

The Office of the Economic Adviser, which sits in the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, compiles the Index of Eight Core Industries and also the Wholesale Price Index, and it publishes the core sector figure every month.

The eight core industries are the energy and basic material industries on which the rest of manufacturing depends, and because they make up two-fifths of the IIP their monthly index is read as an advance signal of what the fuller index will report a little later.

In 2017 the base year of the IIP was shifted to 2011-12, the item basket was refreshed to take in goods that had become important since the previous revision, and the weights were recalculated from the gross value added shares of that year.

Mining, option A, has 14.37 per cent, and electricity, option C, has 7.99 per cent, so the three add up to a hundred.

The IIP is confined to the industrial sector and has exactly three components, mining, manufacturing and electricity, which are options A, B and C. Agriculture and the whole of the services sector, which together account for the larger part of India's output, lie outside the index, and that is why…

It works under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, gathers production returns from more than a dozen source agencies spread across ministries, and publishes the IIP every month as a Quick Estimate that is revised as fuller data come in.

A bear expects prices to slide and therefore sells, hoping to buy the same security back cheaper, which is why a falling market is called a bear market.

Social capital means the networks, shared norms and trust that let people in a society work together, so it is measured by relationships rather than by things or numbers of people.

Statements 1 and 3 hold while statement 2 does not, so this pairing is the right one. The Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures is one of the World Trade Organization agreements that came out of the Uruguay Round in 1995.

All four of these countries sit in the G20, so this is the only group in which no name falls outside the forum.

A brand is the name, term, sign, symbol or design a seller gives a product so that buyers can tell it apart from everything else on the shelf.

The Reserve Bank of India publishes four measures of money supply, and M3 is the one called broad money, also known as aggregate monetary resources.

Parliament passed the Life Insurance Corporation Act in 1956, and the Life Insurance Corporation of India began work on 1 September that year, after the life insurance business of 245 private insurers and provident societies was taken over and merged into it.

Amul grew out of the Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers' Union, started at Anand in Gujarat in 1946 when the farmers of Kheda district organised against the low prices paid to them by middlemen.