The official language of the union territory of Lakshadweep is

The correct answer is B, Article 343. It says that the official language of the Union shall be Hindi in the Devanagari script and that the international form of Indian numerals shall be used, with English to continue for fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution; the Official Languages Act, 1963 then allowed English to continue beyond that period. Option A, Article 341, deals with the President notifying the Scheduled Castes for a state and has nothing to do with language. Option C, Article 345, is about the official language of a state, adopted by its own legislature, so it is the natural distractor here. Option D, Article 351, contains the directive to the Union to promote the spread of Hindi and to enrich it by drawing on Sanskrit and the other languages of India. Remember also that the Constitution never uses the words national language.

The correct answer is B, Article 345. It allows the legislature of a state to adopt by law any one or more of the languages in use in that state, or Hindi, as the language or languages to be used for all or any of the official purposes of that state, and until it does so English continues to be used. Option A, Article 344, provides for the Official Language Commission appointed by the President and for a Committee of Parliament on official language. Option C, Article 347, lets the President, on a demand being made, direct that a language spoken by a substantial proportion of the population of a state be officially recognised in the whole state or a part of it. Option D, Article 350, gives a person the right to submit a representation for the redress of a grievance in any language used in the Union or in the state.

The correct answer is C, 22. The Eighth Schedule began with fourteen languages in 1950, and three amendments took the list to twenty-two: Sindhi in 1967, Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali in 1992, and Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali by the Ninety-second Amendment passed in 2003. Option A, 14, is the original number and is correct only for 1950. Option B, 18, was the number between 1992 and the Ninety-second Amendment, which is why it appears so often as a distractor. Option D, 28, is not a figure the schedule has ever held, though several more languages have been demanded for inclusion. Two further points help in the examination: a language in the schedule need not be the official language of any state, as the cases of Sanskrit and Sindhi show, and candidates may write many public examinations in these languages.

The correct answer is C, the Ninety-second Amendment, passed in 2003, which took the Eighth Schedule from eighteen languages to twenty-two by adding Bodo of Assam, Dogri of the Jammu region, Maithili of Bihar and Santhali, the language of the Santhal people spread over Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha. Option A, the Twenty-first Amendment of 1967, added Sindhi, the language of a community that came to India at Partition without a state of its own. Option B, the Seventy-first Amendment of 1992, added Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali together. Option D, the One Hundred and First Amendment, brought in the Goods and Services Tax and has nothing to do with language. A simple way to hold the sequence is fourteen in 1950, fifteen in 1967, eighteen in 1992 and twenty-two from the amendment of 2003.

The correct answer is A, Nagaland. The state has many tribal languages and no single dominant tongue, so English, already the language of administration and of education through the churches and schools, was adopted as the official language; Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya have done the same, Meghalaya using Khasi and Garo as associate languages. Option B, Manipur, has Manipuri, also called Meiteilon, as its official language, and Manipuri is in the Eighth Schedule. Option C, Tripura, uses Bengali and Kokborok along with English. Option D, Assam, has Assamese, with Bengali used in the Barak valley districts and Bodo in the Bodoland region. The north-eastern states are a favourite of paper setters precisely because the answers differ from state to state, so learn them as a short list rather than by guessing.