Static GK Mixed Quiz: Set 30

The correct answer is B, the United States and Canada. A long stretch of the border between the United States and Canada, from the Lake of the Woods to the Strait of Georgia, follows the 49th parallel of north latitude, which is why that part of the frontier appears as a perfectly straight line on any map; a boundary drawn in this way is called a geometrical boundary. Option A, the United States and Mexico, are divided in part by the Rio Grande, a river boundary, not by a parallel. Option C, Russia and China, share a long border that follows the Amur and Ussuri rivers in the east. Option D, France and Spain, are divided by the crest of the Pyrenees, a mountain boundary. The parallels worth memorising together are the 17th for Vietnam, the 38th for Korea and the 49th for North America.

The correct answer is B, Unity, Faith, Sacrifice. The Indian National Army took 'Ittehad, Etmad, Qurbani' as its motto, and those three words mean unity, faith and sacrifice.

Subhas Chandra Bose reorganised the INA at Singapore in 1943 and gave it the war cry 'Jai Hind' and the marching song 'Kadam Kadam Badhaye Ja'. The army had a women's regiment named after Rani Lakshmibai, which was led by Captain Lakshmi Sahgal.

Option A, Unity and Discipline, is the motto of the National Cadet Corps. Option C, Do or Die, was Gandhi's call to the people in the Quit India Movement of 1942. Option D, Service before self, is a general service slogan and was not the motto of the INA.

Exam tip: INA — motto Ittehad, Etmad, Qurbani; slogan Jai Hind; founded 1942 and reorganised by Bose in 1943.

The correct answer is B. A cockpit was a pit where cockfights were staged, and Belgium received the name because its plains were the chosen battleground of European powers for centuries, Waterloo and the battles of the First World War among them. Option A is wrong; the epithet for a trading centre would be something like a mart or an entrepot, and Belgium's commercial fame rests on Antwerp's port rather than on this nickname. Option C is wrong because the phrase has nothing to do with aviation, even though it sounds modern to a reader who thinks of an aircraft cockpit. Option D is wrong since the geographical centre of Europe is placed in eastern Europe by most calculations, and in any case the epithet is historical rather than locational.

The correct answer is D, Foreign Policy of India. Panchsheel is the name given to the five principles that guide India's conduct towards other countries.

The five are mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in each other's internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. They were written into the preamble of the agreement on trade and intercourse with the Tibet region of China, signed by Jawaharlal Nehru and Zhou Enlai on 29 April 1954. The word itself comes from Buddhist usage, where the five rules of conduct are called panchsheel, and these principles later fed into the non-aligned movement.

A is wrong: the Fundamental Duties were added by the 42nd Amendment in 1976 and now number eleven. B is wrong: NITI Aayog is a policy think tank set up in 2015 and has nothing to do with this term. C is wrong: inter-state relations are dealt with in Articles 261 to 263 of the Constitution.

Exam tip: Panchsheel means the five principles signed by Nehru and Zhou Enlai on 29 April 1954, the base of India's non-alignment.

The correct answer is B, France. The Maginot Line was a chain of concrete forts and obstacles built by France along its eastern frontier between the two world wars, facing Germany, and named after the French minister of war Andre Maginot. Option A, Germany, built the answering fortification on its own side, the Siegfried Line, so the pair must be learned together and in the right order. Option C, Finland, built the Mannerheim Line across the Karelian Isthmus to hold back the Soviet Union in the Winter War. Option D, Poland, is associated with the Curzon Line proposed after the First World War and with the Oder and Neisse Line fixed after the Second. The trap in this question is to assume that a line is named after the country it defends against rather than the country or minister that built it.

The correct answer is D, Rajasthan. Rajasthan is the largest state of India by area, holding the Thar desert in its west and the Aravalli range running across it from the south-west to the north-east. The smallest state by area is Goa, while among the union territories Ladakh is the largest and Lakshadweep the smallest.

Option A, Madhya Pradesh, is the second largest state by area and became so after Chhattisgarh was carved out of it. Option B, Maharashtra, is third by area and the second most populous state. Option C, Uttar Pradesh, is the most populous state according to the 2011 Census but stands well below these in area. The trap in this question is the word area: a candidate who reads it as population will pick Uttar Pradesh, which is why the two superlatives should always be learnt as a pair.

The correct answer is A, Emerald Isle. Ireland is called the Emerald Isle because its heavy rainfall and mild Atlantic climate keep the countryside green all year, emerald being the green gemstone. Option B, Island of Cloves, is wrong; that is Zanzibar off the East African coast, long the world's leading clove producer. Option C, Pearl of the Antilles, is wrong because it refers to Cuba in the Caribbean, which is also called the Sugar Bowl of the World. Option D, Land of Cakes, is wrong but is the nearest neighbour geographically, since it refers to Scotland and its oatcakes. All four options are island epithets, which is exactly how a paper setter builds a difficult-looking but answerable question on this topic. Learn the four together: Ireland is green, Zanzibar grows cloves, Cuba grows sugar and Scotland bakes oatcakes.

The correct answer is D, Vitamin D - Paul Muller, because this is the pair that does not match. Paul Hermann Muller is remembered for showing that DDT kills insects, work for which he received a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; vitamin D is associated with Edward Mellanby, who linked its absence to rickets, and with Adolf Windaus, who worked out its chemistry. Option A is correctly matched because Elmer McCollum identified the fat soluble factor that came to be called vitamin A. Option B is correctly matched because McCollum also identified the water soluble factor named vitamin B. Option C is correctly matched because Albert Szent-Gyorgyi isolated the substance later named vitamin C and won a Nobel Prize for that work. Read the word NOT in the stem carefully, since three of the four pairs here are deliberately correct.

The correct answer is A, Germany and Poland. The Oder and Neisse Line follows the courses of the Oder and the Lusatian Neisse rivers and was settled as the western boundary of Poland after the Second World War, which moved Poland's frontier a long way west. Option B, Poland and Russia, is associated with the Curzon Line, proposed by the British foreign secretary Lord Curzon after the First World War. Option C, Finland and Russia, is associated with the Mannerheim Line, the Finnish defensive works of the Winter War. Option D, Germany and France, is the frontier guarded by the Maginot Line on the French side and the Siegfried Line on the German side. A quick way to hold these is by the century of settlement: Curzon and Mannerheim belong to the earlier conflicts, the Oder and Neisse to the settlement of 1945.

The correct answer is B, the Syama Prasad Mookerjee Port at Kolkata. It sits far up the Hooghly river rather than on the open sea, which makes it the only riverine major port in the country, and it is the oldest of the major ports still working; the Haldia dock complex downstream was added to handle larger vessels that cannot reach Kolkata. Option A is wrong because Paradip in Odisha is a natural harbour on the open coast. Option C is wrong because Visakhapatnam, though famous as the deepest landlocked port with both an inner and an outer harbour, is a coastal port and not a river port. Option D is wrong because Chennai is an artificial harbour built out into the sea. The dredging of silt from the Hooghly is the recurring problem that makes Kolkata distinctive.

The correct answer is B, Manchester of South India. Coimbatore grew into a centre of cotton spinning and textile machinery on the strength of the black cotton soil of the region and its hydroelectric power, so it took the southern version of the Manchester epithet. Option A, Manchester of India, is wrong; that title belongs to Ahmedabad in Gujarat, where the first large cotton mills of western India were founded. Option C, Detroit of India, is wrong because it is used for Chennai, the hub of the automobile industry, after the American motor city. Option D, Pittsburgh of India, is wrong since it refers to Jamshedpur in Jharkhand, the steel city. These four Indian epithets appear together so often that they should be learnt as one block.

The correct answer is B, Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Tilak, along with G. G. Agarkar, started the Marathi weekly Kesari and the English weekly Mahratta in 1881. The articles in Kesari brought him two sedition trials, and in 1908 he was sentenced to six years' transportation, which he served at Mandalay in Burma, where he wrote the Gita Rahasya. Option A is wrong because Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the moderate leader and Tilak's chief opponent within the Congress, was associated with the Sudharak rather than with these two papers. Option C is wrong because Bipin Chandra Pal founded Bande Mataram in 1906, which Aurobindo Ghosh edited. Option D is wrong because Dadabhai Naoroji started the Gujarati paper Rast Goftar in 1851 and later the journal Voice of India. Kesari still appears in questions as the paper through which Tilak gave the slogan that freedom is our birthright.

The correct answer is C, Bangladesh. India's land border with Bangladesh is about 4,096 kilometres long, the longest it has with any neighbour, and it touches five states: West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram. Option A, China, comes second at about 3,488 kilometres, touching Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. Option B, Pakistan, is third at about 3,323 kilometres, touching Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Option D, Nepal, follows at about 1,751 kilometres, touching Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Sikkim. Myanmar, Bhutan and Afghanistan come next in that order, Afghanistan being the shortest at about 106 kilometres. The order Bangladesh, China, Pakistan, Nepal, Myanmar, Bhutan and Afghanistan is worth memorising as a single sequence, because papers often ask for the second or the third longest rather than the longest.

The correct answer is C, San Francisco Conference. The Charter of the United Nations was signed at San Francisco on 26 June 1945, at the close of the United Nations Conference on International Organization, by the delegates of fifty nations; Poland signed a little later and so the organisation began with fifty-one original members. The Charter came into force on 24 October 1945, once the five permanent members of the Security Council and a majority of the others had ratified it, and that day is kept as United Nations Day. The name United Nations was coined by President Franklin Roosevelt. Option A is wrong because The Hague is the seat of the International Court of Justice, not the place of signing. Option B is wrong because London is where the General Assembly held its first session, in January 1946. Option D is wrong because no United Nations conference was held at Berlin. Exam tip: signed 26 June 1945 at San Francisco and in force from 24 October 1945.

The correct answer is B, Kochi. Kochi in Kerala, with its natural harbour and its long history as a spice port trading with the Arabs, the Chinese, the Portuguese and the Dutch, is called the Queen of the Arabian Sea. Option A, Mumbai, is wrong; it is the Gateway of India and also the city of seven islands, and no queen epithet attaches to it. Option C, Panaji, is wrong because the capital of Goa is not given this title, although Goa itself is sometimes called the Pearl of the Orient. Option D, Mangaluru, is wrong even though it is also a port on the same coast with a flourishing trade. Pair this with Queen of the Deccan for Pune and Queen of the Hills for Darjeeling to avoid mixing the three.

The correct answer is A, Maldives. BIMSTEC, the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation, has seven members: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand. The Maldives is not one of them, although it is a member of SAARC. The grouping began at Bangkok in 1997 as BIST-EC with Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand; Myanmar joined later the same year, and Nepal and Bhutan came in 2004, when the present name was adopted. Its permanent secretariat is at Dhaka, and because it links five South Asian with two South-East Asian countries, it is often described as a bridge between South Asia and South-East Asia. Option B is wrong because India is a founding member. Option C is wrong because Bhutan joined in 2004. Option D is wrong because Nepal also joined in 2004. Exam tip: BIMSTEC has seven members with no Pakistan, Afghanistan or Maldives, and its secretariat is at Dhaka.

The correct answer is B, the Simla Agreement of 1972. After the war of 1971 India and Pakistan signed the Simla Agreement, which provided that the line resulting from the ceasefire of December 1971 would be respected by both sides, and from then on that line was called the Line of Control. Option A, the Tashkent Declaration of 1966, ended the war of 1965 and provided for a withdrawal to the earlier positions, but it did not rename the line. Option C, the Lahore Declaration of 1999, dealt mainly with nuclear confidence-building measures. Option D, the Karachi Agreement of 1949, is where the line was first fixed, under the name Cease Fire Line, after the first war over Kashmir. Note separately that beyond the point NJ 9842 the two armies face each other along the Actual Ground Position Line in the Siachen region.

The correct answer is B, Kosi. The Kosi descends from Nepal carrying a very heavy silt load, builds up its own bed and shifts its channel across the north Bihar plain, flooding fresh stretches of farmland, which is why it is called the Sorrow of Bihar. Option A, Gandak, is wrong; it is another north Bihar tributary of the Ganga and does flood, but the epithet is not used for it. Option C, Son, is wrong because it joins the Ganga from the south and is not known for shifting its course in this way. Option D, Damodar, is the strongest distractor; it was called the Sorrow of Bengal until the dams and barrages of the Damodar Valley Corporation, built on the model of the Tennessee Valley Authority, brought its floods under control.

The correct answer is A, Finland and Russia. The Mannerheim Line was built by Finland across the Karelian Isthmus and is named after Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim; it was the main Finnish defensive position against the Soviet Union in the Winter War of 1939 and 1940. Option B, Germany and Poland, is the frontier of the Oder and Neisse Line settled in 1945. Option C, Poland and Russia, is associated with the Curzon Line proposed after the First World War and later broadly followed in the post-war settlement. Option D, France and Germany, is the frontier of the Maginot and Siegfried lines. The four fortified lines of twentieth-century Europe worth tabulating are therefore Maginot for France, Siegfried for Germany, Mannerheim for Finland and the Hindenburg position of the First World War for the German army in northern France.

The correct answer is A, Roof of the World. The Pamir plateau, where the Himalaya, the Karakoram, the Hindu Kush, the Kunlun and the Tian Shan meet, carries an average elevation of several thousand metres and is therefore called the Roof of the World, a name sometimes extended to the Tibetan plateau. Option B, Dark Continent, is wrong; this nineteenth-century European phrase was used for Africa, whose interior was then unmapped by European travellers. Option C, Forbidden City, is wrong because it is used for Lhasa in Tibet, closed for long periods to outsiders, and also for the palace complex at Beijing. Option D, Bread Basket of the World, is wrong since it refers to the wheat-growing prairies of North America, and a similar phrase is used for Ukraine in Europe.