Abbreviations and Full Forms: Exam List for GK Papers

The correct answer is A, National Institution for Transforming India. NITI Aayog replaced the Planning Commission on 1 January 2015 and works as the policy think tank of the Government of India. The Prime Minister is its chairperson, and it has a vice-chairperson, a chief executive officer and the chief ministers of the states in its Governing Council. Option B is wrong because no official expansion uses the word Initiative, though it sounds plausible. Option C is wrong because the abbreviation has nothing to do with technology; NITI is a policy body, not a technical institute. Option D is wrong because industrial training institutes are the ITIs, a quite separate network of vocational schools run under the Directorate General of Training. Read every word of the expansion before marking, since the distractors differ by one word.

The correct answer is B, Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. A laser produces a narrow, coherent, single-wavelength beam by stimulated emission, in which an excited atom is made to release a photon identical to the one that strikes it. Option A is the usual trap, replacing Amplification with Absorption: absorption is the opposite process, in which energy is taken in rather than released as a beam. Option C is wrong because the word Linear belongs to no standard expansion, and lasers are not described as linear amplifiers of standard rays. Option D is wrong because a laser neither analyses light nor emits sequentially. The companion acronym is MASER, Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, which came first and was developed by Charles Townes.

The correct answer is C, Indian Financial System Code. The IFSC is an eleven-character alphanumeric code that identifies a particular bank branch in the electronic payment systems operated by the Reserve Bank of India, and it is required for NEFT and RTGS transfers. The first four characters are the bank, the fifth is zero, and the last six identify the branch. Option A is wrong because the word Settlement belongs to RTGS, Real Time Gross Settlement, not to the IFSC. Option B is wrong because the code is national, not international; it covers branches in India alone. Option D is wrong because there is no body called a fund settlement centre in the payment system. The companion abbreviation on a cheque leaf is MICR, Magnetic Ink Character Recognition.

The correct answer is B, United Nations Children's Fund. The agency was created by the General Assembly in 1946 as the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund, for children in countries ruined by the Second World War, and in 1953 it was made a permanent part of the United Nations and renamed the United Nations Children's Fund, keeping the familiar acronym. Its headquarters is in New York, and it received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965. Option A is the original name, which is why it is the hardest distractor; examiners who want it say "originally". Option C is wrong because education is the work of UNESCO, which is a separate agency based in Paris. Option D is wrong because no United Nations body is called a universal nations forum.

The correct answer is A, Radio Detection and Ranging. Radar sends out radio waves and measures the echo that returns from an object, so the time taken gives the distance, or range, and the shift in frequency gives the speed by the Doppler effect. The underwater equivalent is SONAR, Sound Navigation and Ranging, which uses sound waves because radio waves are absorbed quickly in water. Option B is wrong because no standard expansion uses Radial Direction. Option C is tempting since radar does depend on reflection, but the final word of the acronym is Ranging, which is the measurement of distance. Option D is wrong because Rapid and Reporting belong to no expansion of the term. Doppler weather radars are used by the India Meteorological Department to track rain and cyclones.

The correct answer is B, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. The Act was passed in 2005 as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and renamed after Mahatma Gandhi in 2009. It guarantees at least a hundred days of unskilled manual work in a financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer for it, with a legal right to an unemployment allowance if work is not provided in time. Option A is the standard trap, putting Generation in place of Guarantee: the guarantee is the whole point of the law, since it makes employment an enforceable right. Option C is wrong because the official name uses Employment and not Rozgar. Option D is wrong because the scheme is rural and is an Act, not an agency, and no word Nagar appears in it.

The correct answer is B, Navigation with Indian Constellation. NavIC is the name given to the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System, or IRNSS, built by ISRO to give position fixes over India and a region around it, independent of the American GPS. The word also means sailor or navigator in Indian languages, which is why it was chosen. Option A is wrong because no vehicle information centre carries this name; vehicle records are kept in the VAHAN database. Option C is wrong because the expansion is not about coordinates, and the second letter stands for the preposition with. Option D is wrong because NavIC provides position and timing signals, not internet access. The system's satellites sit in geostationary and inclined geosynchronous orbits rather than the medium earth orbits used by GPS.

The correct answer is A, Sound Navigation and Ranging. Sonar sends a pulse of sound into the water and times the echo returning from the sea bed, a shoal of fish or a submarine; since the speed of sound in sea water is roughly 1,500 metres a second, the time gives the distance. This method of measuring depth is called echo sounding. Option B is wrong because the standard expansion uses Sound rather than Sonic and Ranging rather than Reflection. Option C is wrong because sonar is used for navigation and distance finding, not for recording sound. Option D is wrong because sonar is used by surface ships and submarines alike, so the word Submarine is not part of the acronym. Remember the pair: radar for air with radio waves, sonar for water with sound.

The correct answer is C, Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. OPEC was founded at the Baghdad Conference of 1960 by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, and its secretariat has been at Vienna in Austria since 1965. It coordinates the petroleum policies of its member states and its production decisions move world crude prices, which is why Indian papers ask about it. Option A is wrong because the word is Exporting, not Enriched; enrichment belongs to uranium, not oil. Option B is wrong because OPEC is an organization of states and not a commission, and the word Producing does not appear in its name. Option D is wrong because no body of that name exists. A related term is OPEC Plus, the wider group that includes Russia and other non-member producers.

The correct answer is A, HyperText Transfer Protocol. HTTP is the set of rules by which a browser asks a web server for a page and the server sends it back; HTTPS is the same protocol carried over an encrypted connection, which is why banking sites use it. Option B is wrong because the last word is Protocol, a set of rules, and not a Program. Option C is wrong because the first word is HyperText, the linked text of the web, and not High Transfer. Option D is wrong because the acronym ends in Protocol rather than Process. Keep the related expansions together: HTML is HyperText Markup Language, URL is Uniform Resource Locator, FTP is File Transfer Protocol and SMTP, used for outgoing mail, is Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.

The correct answer is B, Siddha. AYUSH expands as Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy, so the letters stand for five traditional systems in which the S is Siddha, the Tamil system of medicine associated with the Siddhars of south India. Option A is wrong because surgery is a branch of modern allopathic practice and is not one of the AYUSH systems, though Sushruta is remembered in Ayurveda for surgical technique. Option C is a real system, Sowa-Rigpa of the Himalayan region, which the ministry also looks after and which is sometimes written into the longer form, but it is not what the S of the acronym itself stands for. Option D is wrong because spa therapy is not a recognised system of medicine in India at all.

The correct answer is B, the names of two rivers, the Brahmaputra and the Moskva. BrahMos is a supersonic cruise missile built by BrahMos Aerospace, a joint venture of India's Defence Research and Development Organisation and Russia's NPO Mashinostroyeniya, and its name joins the Brahmaputra of India with the Moskva of Russia, the river that runs through Moscow. It can be fired from land, ships, submarines and aircraft. Option A is wrong because Brahmastra and Mosaic form no part of the name, although Brahmastra appears in mythology. Option C is wrong because the name honours the two countries and not individuals. Option D is wrong because there is no Brahma Modular System; the missile is named for geography, which is the point the question tests.