Static GK Mixed Quiz: Set 38

The correct answer is B, Canada. The New Development Bank was founded by the five BRICS countries, and Canada is not one of them.

The founding members are Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. They agreed to set up the bank at the BRICS summit in Fortaleza, Brazil, in July 2014, and it began work in 2015 with its headquarters in Shanghai, China. Its first president was K. V. Kamath of India. The bank lends money for infrastructure and sustainable development projects in member and other developing countries. It was earlier called the BRICS Development Bank, and it has since admitted some new members, but the founders remain the five BRICS nations.

A is wrong: Brazil is a founding member and hosted the 2014 Fortaleza summit where the bank was agreed.

C is wrong: Russia is one of the five founding BRICS members.

D is wrong: India is a founding member and gave the bank its first president.

Exam tip: NDB: Fortaleza 2014, headquarters Shanghai, first president K. V. Kamath; AIIB headquarters Beijing.

The correct answer is A, NH-44, which runs about 3,745 kilometres from Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir to Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu and is the longest National Highway in the country. It was created in the renumbering of 2010 by merging several older highways, including the old NH-1A, NH-1, NH-2, NH-3, NH-75, NH-26 and NH-7, and it passes through about a dozen states and union territories. Option B, NH-27, is the longest east-west highway, running from Porbandar in Gujarat to Silchar in Assam along the East-West Corridor, and it is the second longest overall, which makes it the strongest distractor. Option C, NH-48, is the busy Delhi-Mumbai-Chennai route that replaced the old NH-8. Option D, NH-16, runs along the eastern coast from Kolkata towards Chennai. Remember the numbering rule as well: NH-44 runs north to south and therefore carries an even number, and even numbers increase from the east coast towards the west.

The correct answer is B, Dona Paula in Goa. The institute is a laboratory of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and studies the physics, chemistry, biology and geology of the seas around India, with regional centres at Kochi, Visakhapatnam and Mumbai. Option A, Kochi, is one of those regional centres and also holds the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute and the Central Institute of Fisheries Technology, which is why it is the usual wrong choice. Option C, Visakhapatnam, has another regional centre and a naval base. Option D, Chennai, holds the Central Leather Research Institute and the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, not ocean research. Goa also holds the National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research, the body that runs India's stations in Antarctica and the Arctic, so link Goa with both ocean institutes.

The correct answer is C, the Treaty of Bassein. Signed in 1802, it bound Peshwa Baji Rao II to Lord Wellesley's subsidiary alliance after his defeat by the Holkars at Poona. The Peshwa accepted a Company force in his territory at his own cost and gave up the right to deal with any other power, which the other Maratha chiefs treated as a surrender of Maratha independence and which led directly to the Second Anglo-Maratha War. Option A is wrong because the Treaty of Purandar of 1776 was an agreement between the Company and the Marathas that set aside the earlier Treaty of Surat. Option B is wrong because Salbai of 1782 only ended the first war between them. Option D is wrong because the Treaty of Amritsar was signed with Ranjit Singh in 1809 and fixed the Sutlej as the limit of Sikh expansion.

The correct answer is B, 1988. The National Highways Authority of India Act was passed in 1988, and the authority it created became operational in 1995; it develops, maintains and manages the National Highways entrusted to it and is the body behind the Golden Quadrilateral and most of the country's expressways, working under the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways. Option C, 1995, is the year it actually began functioning, which is the usual trap in this question, so keep the two dates in order: constituted in 1988, operational in 1995. Option A, 1956, is the year of the National Highways Act, the law under which a road is declared a National Highway and tolls are levied. Option D, 2017, is the year the Bharatmala Pariyojana was approved as the umbrella highway programme. Also remember the National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation, set up in 2014 for border and north-eastern roads.

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 A, Punjab National Bank. Punjab National Bank, founded at Lahore in 1894 and the first Indian bank started wholly with Indian capital, uses the line The Name You Can Bank Upon, which plays on the word bank as both a noun and a verb. Option B is wrong because Punjab and Sind Bank, a separate public sector bank with its head office in New Delhi, uses Where Service Is a Way of Life, and the similarity of the two names is exactly what the question is testing. Option C is wrong because Indian Bank uses Your Own Bank. Option D is wrong because UCO Bank, formerly the United Commercial Bank of Kolkata, uses Honours Your Trust. When two bank names share a word, check the tagline rather than the name, because paper setters group them deliberately.

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, Thailand. The kingdom was called Siam until 1939, when it took the name Thailand, understood as the land of the free, a name that fits the fact that it is the one country of South-East Asia never ruled by a European power. Option A is wrong because Myanmar was called Burma until 1989, and its own earlier capital Rangoon became Yangon at the same time. Option C is wrong because Vietnam formed part of French Indochina, and it is its southern city Saigon that was renamed, becoming Ho Chi Minh City in 1976. Option D is wrong because Cambodia was known as Kampuchea for a period and in older history as Kambuja, the land of the Khmer kings who built Angkor Wat. Learning the four South-East Asian changes as one group, Siam, Burma, Kampuchea and Saigon, keeps them apart in the examination hall.

The correct answer is C, Valentina Tereshkova. The Soviet cosmonaut flew alone aboard Vostok 6 in June 1963 and spent nearly three days in orbit, becoming the first woman in space, two years after Yuri Gagarin's flight.

Option A, Svetlana Savitskaya, was the second woman in space and, in 1984, the first woman to walk in space, so she answers a neighbouring question rather than this one. Option B, Sally Ride, was the first American woman in space, in 1983, and the trap works only if the candidate reads American for world. Option D, Kalpana Chawla, was the first woman of Indian origin to go into space, flying with NASA in 1997 and dying in the Columbia accident of 2003. Fix the pair as Gagarin for the first man and Tereshkova for the first woman, both of the Soviet Union.

The correct answer is A, 1 only. Membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) eases access to advanced nuclear technology and trade, but it does not make a country a party to the NPT.

The NSG is a group of nuclear supplier countries set up in 1974, after India's first nuclear test at Pokhran, to control the export of nuclear material, equipment and technology through common guidelines. Members trade nuclear items among themselves under these rules and take part in deciding them, which gives them easier access to the latest technology. The NPT is a separate treaty that came into force in 1970; joining it requires a country to sign and ratify it, and NSG membership does not do this automatically. India is not a member of the NSG, but received a special waiver from the group in 2008 for civil nuclear trade.

B is wrong: statement 2 is false, as NPT membership is never automatic.

C is wrong: only statement 1 is correct.

D is wrong: statement 1 is a real benefit of NSG membership.

Exam tip: NSG 1974 (after Pokhran-I), consensus-based export control group; NPT 1970 is a separate treaty; India got an NSG waiver in 2008.

The correct answer is C, Ganga, Brahmaputra and Meghna. These three rivers meet near the head of the Bay of Bengal and drop an enormous load of silt, building the Sundarbans, the largest delta in the world, shared between India and Bangladesh. It also holds the largest mangrove forest on earth, is a national park and tiger reserve on the Indian side, and is a World Heritage Site.

Option A, the Godavari and the Krishna, build large deltas of their own on the eastern coast of peninsular India, but neither is the largest. Option B, the Narmada and the Tapi, flow west through rift valleys and form estuaries rather than deltas, a point examiners like to test on its own. Option D, the Mahanadi and the Subarnarekha, reach the Bay of Bengal in Odisha, and the Mahanadi builds a fair delta, but nothing of the scale of the Sundarbans.

The correct answer is A, Mysuru, in Karnataka. The institute works on food processing, preservation, packaging and nutrition, and it shares the city with the Defence Food Research Laboratory, so Mysuru is best remembered as the food research city. Option B, Bengaluru, holds the Indian Institute of Science, the National Aerospace Laboratories, the U R Rao Satellite Centre and the Raman Research Institute, a long list but no food technology institute. Option C, Pune, holds the National Chemical Laboratory, the National Institute of Virology and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. Option D, Hyderabad, holds the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, the National Institute of Nutrition and the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology; the nutrition institute there is the usual trap, since nutrition and food technology sound alike but belong to different councils.

The correct answer is C, Pacific Ocean. The Pacific covers a greater area than all the land on earth put together and is also the deepest ocean, holding the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, the deepest known point on the planet. Its rim is ringed by volcanoes and earthquake zones, which is why it is called the Ring of Fire.

Option A, the Atlantic, is the second largest ocean and is famous for the mid-Atlantic ridge along which the sea floor is spreading. Option B, the Indian Ocean, is the third largest, the only major ocean named after a country, and the one whose monsoon winds shaped the trade of the region. Option D, the Arctic, is the smallest and shallowest of the oceans and is largely covered by ice. A candidate should remember the order by size, Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern and Arctic, because the paper asks for the smallest as often as for the largest.

The correct answer is A, odd numbers. In the system adopted in 2010, highways whose general alignment is east to west carry odd numbers, while those running north to south carry even numbers. NH-27, which runs from Porbandar in Gujarat to Silchar in Assam and is the longest east-west highway in the country, is the clearest illustration, as is NH-19 from Delhi to Kolkata. Option B reverses the rule and is the answer most often marked by mistake; even numbers belong to the north-south highways such as NH-44 from Srinagar to Kanyakumari, NH-16 along the east coast and NH-66 along the west coast. Note the order of the numbers too: even numbers increase from east to west and odd numbers increase from north to south. Option C is wrong because three-digit numbers are not a direction at all; they are given to the subsidiary routes of a main highway, so NH-344 is a branch connected with NH-44. Option D is wrong because letters are only suffixes, as in NH-966B, used to mark a spur or branch of the parent highway rather than to replace a number.

The correct answer is C, James Chadwick. Chadwick showed in 1932 that the radiation given off when beryllium is struck by alpha particles consists of neutral particles of about the mass of a proton, and he named them neutrons; he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for it. Option A is wrong because J. J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897 through his cathode ray experiments. Option B is wrong because Ernest Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus with the gold foil experiment and named the proton, and although he had predicted a neutral particle, he did not find it. Option D is wrong because Niels Bohr gave the model of the atom in which electrons occupy fixed energy levels. Fix the order for the exam: electron in 1897, nucleus and proton with Rutherford, neutron with Chadwick in 1932.

The correct answer is B, Bank of Baroda. Bank of Baroda, founded in 1908 by Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III of Baroda, calls itself India's International Bank because it has long carried the widest network of overseas branches among Indian public sector banks. Option A is wrong because the State Bank of India uses The Banker to Every Indian, having earlier used Pure Banking, Nothing Else and With You - All the Way. Option C is wrong because Bank of India, although it too has a sizeable foreign presence, uses Relationships Beyond Banking, and the closeness of the two names makes it the standard trap in this question. Option D is wrong because Canara Bank, founded at Mangaluru, uses Together We Can, a line that puts the bank's own name inside the slogan.

The correct answer is C, 1972, the year the island became a republic and took the name Sri Lanka in place of Ceylon. Option A is wrong because 1948 is the year it became independent, while still called Ceylon, so the two dates are often mixed up and the question is set precisely for that reason. Option B is wrong because 1956 belongs to the language legislation of the island and to no change of the country's name. Option D is wrong because 1989 is the year Burma became Myanmar, which is the other favourite date in this group. The island's capital is another trap worth noting: the commercial capital is Colombo but the administrative and legislative capital is Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, and papers often ask for the second name. So the chain to remember is independence in 1948, republic and the name Sri Lanka in 1972.

The correct answer is B, Pune, in Maharashtra. The institute is the country's reference laboratory for viral diseases, it tests and confirms outbreaks and it also works on vaccines; the National AIDS Research Institute is in the same city. Option A, New Delhi, is the headquarters of the Indian Council of Medical Research itself and holds the National Institute of Malaria Research and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, which makes it a plausible answer for anyone who remembers only the council. Option C, Kolkata, holds the council's institute for cholera and enteric diseases. Option D, Hyderabad, holds the National Institute of Nutrition. Remember the council's map in pairs: Pune for viruses and AIDS, Hyderabad for nutrition, Kolkata for cholera, Puducherry for vector control and Agra for leprosy.

The correct answer is B, the Border Roads Organisation. The BRO was raised in 1960 to build and maintain the roads of the frontier regions, works under the Ministry of Defence, and has to its credit the Atal Tunnel under the Rohtang Pass as well as some of the highest motorable roads in Ladakh. Option A, the National Highways Authority of India, was constituted in 1988 and is responsible for the National Highways and most expressways, but it functions under the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways and is not a defence organisation. Option C, the National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation, was created in 2014 and does take up roads in border and north-eastern areas, which makes it the cleverest distractor, but it too sits under the highways ministry and did not build this tunnel. Option D, the Central Public Works Department, builds government offices and residences, not strategic mountain roads.