SSC 2022 Previous Year GK Questions with Answers

The correct answer is B, Article 324. This article vests the superintendence, direction and control of elections in the Election Commission of India.

Article 324 falls in Part XV of the Constitution, which covers elections. The Commission handles elections to Parliament, to the state legislatures, and to the offices of President and Vice President; elections to panchayats and municipalities are conducted by State Election Commissions under Articles 243K and 243ZA. The Election Commission began as a single-member body on 25 January 1950 and the Chief Election Commissioner and other Election Commissioners hold a fixed tenure fixed by law.

A is wrong: Article 356 provides for President's rule in a state. C is wrong: Article 352 deals with the proclamation of a National Emergency. D is wrong: Article 101 lists the grounds on which a seat in Parliament becomes vacant.

Exam tip: Article 324 - Election Commission; Articles 243K and 243ZA - State Election Commissions.

The correct answer is B, 5. The Vice President of India holds office for a term of five years from the date of entering upon the office.

Articles 63 to 71 deal with the Vice President. The Vice President is elected by an electoral college made up of the members of both Houses of Parliament, including the nominated members, by proportional representation through the single transferable vote and by secret ballot. State legislatures take no part, unlike in the President's election. The Vice President is the ex officio Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, may resign by writing to the President, and can be removed by a resolution passed by a majority of all the then members of the Rajya Sabha and agreed to by the Lok Sabha.

A is wrong: six years is the term of a member of the Rajya Sabha. C and D are wrong: two and three years match no term fixed for this office.

Exam tip: President and Vice President both serve five-year terms; Articles 52-62 for the President, 63-71 for the Vice President.

The correct answer is C, Awadh. Kathak, the classical dance of north India, reached its golden age in the nineteenth century under Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Awadh, who ruled from Lucknow until the British annexed his kingdom in 1856. He was a dancer and composer himself, wrote under the pen name Akhtarpiya, created the dance drama Rahas, and supported Thakur Prasad and the brothers Bindadin and Kalka Prasad, whose family built the Lucknow gharana with its stress on grace, expression and thumri. Kathak's other schools are the Jaipur, Banaras and Raigarh gharanas. Option A is wrong because Hyderabad was ruled by the Nizams of the Asaf Jahi line. Option B is wrong because Rampur was a separate Rohilla state, remembered for the Rampur-Sahaswan gharana of music, not for Kathak. Option D is wrong because Jaunpur was the Sharqi sultanate of the fifteenth century. Exam tip: Wajid Ali Shah goes with Awadh, the Lucknow gharana of Kathak and thumri.

The correct answer is C, 26 January 1950. The State Emblem of India was adopted on the day the Constitution came into force and the country became a Republic. It is adapted from the Lion Capital of Ashoka at Sarnath, with three of the four lions visible, a Dharma Chakra on the abacus flanked by a bull and a horse, and the motto Satyameva Jayate from the Mundaka Upanishad below it in Devanagari script.

Option A, 15 August 1947, is Independence Day and is the date candidates most often pick by mistake. Option B, 26 January 1959, is the right day of the year but the wrong year and is placed there to punish careless reading. Option D, 15 August 1952, matches neither event. Keep the pair apart: the National Flag was adopted on 22 July 1947 by the Constituent Assembly, while the emblem and the National Anthem belong to January 1950.

The correct answer is D, 11. A hockey side fields eleven players at a time, one of whom is the goalkeeper, and the other ten are spread across defence, midfield and attack. Substitutes wait off the field and may be sent on and taken off any number of times while play goes on, which is called rolling substitution, but the count on the field never rises above eleven unless the umpire has to be told otherwise.

Option A, 10, is the number a team is left with after a player is sent off with a yellow or a red card, not the normal count. Option B, 16, is the size of the full squad a team names for a tournament such as the Olympics, of whom eleven take the field. Option C, 12, is the number in a kho kho team, of whom nine enter the field. Cricket and football also field eleven players each, which is why such a question often lists several eleven player games together.

The correct answer is B, Rs. 30,000 crore. The Union Budget 2021-22 proposed raising the corpus of the Contingency Fund of India from five hundred crore rupees to thirty thousand crore rupees, and the change was carried through the Finance Bill of that year. The fund is constituted under Article 267, is held at the disposal of the President, and is used to meet urgent unforeseen expenditure pending authorisation by Parliament, after which it is recouped.

Option A, fifteen thousand crore, option C, twenty-five thousand crore, and option D, ten thousand crore, are all lower than the amount actually provided. The point worth remembering beyond the number is the reason for the increase: the corpus had remained unchanged for decades while the size of the budget had grown many times over, leaving too little room for genuine emergencies.

The correct answer is C, 6.8. The budget estimate for the fiscal deficit of the central government in 2021-22 was placed at 6.8 per cent of gross domestic product. The figure was unusually high because the budget followed the pandemic year, when revenue had collapsed and expenditure on relief had risen sharply, and the government set out a glide path to bring the deficit below 4.5 per cent of GDP by 2025-26.

Option A, 5.1 per cent, is far below the level announced for that year and reflects no budget estimate of the period. Option B, 7.6 per cent, and option D, 7.2 per cent, are both higher than the 2021-22 estimate; the revised estimate for the preceding pandemic year, 2020-21, was in fact placed even higher, near 9.5 per cent, which is the figure candidates often confuse with this one.

The correct answer is A, the Union Budget 2021-22. It was the first union budget in India not to be printed. The customary halwa ceremony that marks the start of printing was replaced, and the documents were made available to members of Parliament and to the public in electronic form through a dedicated Union Budget mobile application and the budget website.

Option B, the 2019-20 budget, is remembered instead for the briefcase being replaced by a red cloth ledger, but the documents were still printed. Option C, the 2020-21 budget, was presented before the change and is known for the longest budget speech delivered in Parliament. Option D, the 2018-19 budget, was the first full budget after the rollout of the goods and services tax, and again was a printed budget.

The correct answer is B, 97.2 percent. Textbooks describing the distribution of water on earth give about 97.2 per cent as ocean water, roughly 2 per cent locked in ice caps and glaciers, and well under 1 per cent as groundwater, lakes, rivers, soil moisture and water vapour together. This is why fresh water is described as a scarce resource even though the planet looks blue from space.

Option A, 94 per cent, option C, 90.2 per cent, and option D, 92.2 per cent, are all too low and would leave an impossibly large share of the planet's water as fresh water. The safe way to remember the set is that the oceans take a little over 97 per cent, the frozen ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland take most of what is left, and everything that human beings actually use comes out of the small remainder.

The correct answer is A, the Pacific. The Ring of Fire is a horseshoe-shaped belt running around the rim of the Pacific Ocean, from the Andes up the west coast of the Americas, across the Aleutians and down through Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia to New Zealand. It holds the majority of the world's active volcanoes and is the source of most large earthquakes, because it follows the lines along which oceanic plates are being subducted.

Option B, the Indian Ocean, does have the seismic Sunda arc on its eastern edge, but that arc is counted as part of the Pacific ring and the ocean as a whole has no such belt. Option C, the Atlantic, is widening rather than closing, so its activity is concentrated along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and is mostly gentle. Option D, the Arctic, is tectonically quiet apart from the slow spreading ridge that continues from the Atlantic.

The correct answer is B, neither I nor II, which means that both the pairs given are correct and none of them is wrong. In the Koeppen classification as applied to India, the semi-arid steppe climate marked BShw covers parts of Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and the drier interior of the peninsula, where rainfall is low but not as low as in a true desert. The monsoon type with a dry summer, marked As, covers the Coromandel coast of Tamil Nadu, which stays dry in the south-west monsoon months and receives its rain from the retreating monsoon in winter.

Options A and C each reject one of the two correct pairs, and option D rejects both. The trap lies in expecting every statement in such a question to contain an error.

The correct answer is Prime Minister. NITI Aayog, the National Institution for Transforming India, was set up on 1 January 2015 by a resolution of the Union Cabinet to replace the Planning Commission, which had existed since 1950. The Prime Minister is its ex officio Chairperson, just as the Prime Minister chaired the Planning Commission. It also has a Vice-Chairperson appointed by the Prime Minister, a Chief Executive Officer, and a Governing Council that includes the Chief Ministers of all States and the Lieutenant Governors of Union Territories.

The President has no role in NITI Aayog. Senior Union ministers, usually including the Home Minister and the Finance Minister, are its ex officio members, which makes them tempting options, but neither chairs it. Note that NITI Aayog is neither a constitutional nor a statutory body: it was created by an executive resolution, like the Planning Commission before it. The Prime Minister also chairs other bodies, such as the National Disaster Management Authority, the Inter-State Council and the National Integration Council.

The correct answer is D, Diwan-i-insha. The Diwan-i-insha was the department of royal correspondence in the Delhi Sultanate. It drafted the Sultan's letters and orders to provincial governors and other rulers, kept copies of them and was headed by the Dabir-i-khas, who had to be a careful writer of Persian because the wording of a farman carried the Sultan's authority. Option A is wrong because the Diwan-i-arz was the military department, under the Ariz-i-mumalik, which recruited soldiers, paid them and held the horse-branding and descriptive roll system. Option B is wrong because the Diwan-i-khairat was the department of charity, set up by Firoz Shah Tughlaq to give help to the poor and to arrange marriages of poor girls. Option C is wrong because the Diwan-i-risalat looked after religious matters and grants to scholars. Exam tip: insha for letters, arz for the army, wizarat for finance.

The correct answer is D, Original. Article 131 of the Constitution gives the Supreme Court exclusive original jurisdiction in disputes between the Government of India and one or more states, and in disputes among states themselves. Exclusive means no other court can hear such a case, and original means it starts in the Supreme Court and does not come on appeal. The article does not cover disputes arising from a treaty or agreement that was in force before the Constitution began. Option A is wrong because appellate jurisdiction, under Articles 132 to 134, is about appeals from High Court judgments in constitutional, civil and criminal cases. Option B is wrong because advisory jurisdiction under Article 143 lets the President seek the Court's opinion on a question of law, and that opinion does not bind him. Option C is wrong because writ jurisdiction under Article 32 is for enforcing fundamental rights of citizens. Exam tip: Article 131 original, 143 advisory, 32 writs.

The correct answer is B, tuberculosis (TB). The BCG vaccine takes its name from Albert Calmette and Camille Guerin, the two French scientists who developed it from a weakened strain of Mycobacterium bovis. In India it is given as a single dose soon after birth under the Universal Immunisation Programme, and it protects infants mainly from the severe forms of the disease, such as tuberculous meningitis and miliary tuberculosis. Tuberculosis itself is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, identified by Robert Koch in 1882, and it spreads through droplets when a patient coughs. Option A is wrong because typhoid, caused by Salmonella typhi, has its own conjugate vaccine. Option C is wrong because mumps is a viral disease covered by the MMR vaccine along with measles and rubella. Option D is wrong because plague, caused by Yersinia pestis and carried by rat fleas, needs a different vaccine. Exam tip: BCG at birth for TB, and World TB Day falls on 24 March.

The correct answer is D, Ashwini Kumar Dutta. He founded the Swadesh Bandhab Samiti at Barisal in 1905, during the movement against the partition of Bengal. The samiti built a network of village volunteers who pushed swadeshi goods, enforced the boycott of foreign cloth, settled local disputes through their own arbitration courts and organised relief work, which made it the strongest of the Swadeshi era volunteer bodies. A teacher by calling, Dutta had earlier set up Brajamohan College in Barisal, and the government banned the samiti and deported him in 1908. Option A is wrong because Chandrasekhar Azad led the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association and died at Alfred Park, Allahabad, in 1931. Option B is wrong because Bhagat Singh worked through the Naujawan Bharat Sabha and the HSRA. Option C is wrong because Rajguru was an HSRA member hanged with Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev in 1931. Exam tip: Swadeshi volunteer bodies - Swadesh Bandhab Samiti of Barisal and Anushilan Samiti of Bengal.

The correct answer is B, Leaders of Opposition in Parliament. The Salary and Allowances of Leaders of Opposition in Parliament Act, 1977 gave the post statutory recognition for the first time and fixed the pay and perks of the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha. The Act describes the Leader of the Opposition as the leader of the largest opposition party recognised as such by the Speaker or the Chairman, and the office carries the rank of a Cabinet minister. The holder sits on the committees that select the Director of the CBI, the Central Vigilance Commissioner, the Lokpal and the Chief Information Commissioner. Option A is wrong because the President's pay comes under a 1951 law. Option C is wrong because the Prime Minister is paid under the law on ministers' salaries of 1952. Option D is wrong because the office of Governor General ended in 1950. Exam tip: Leader of the Opposition, statutory since 1977, ranks with a Cabinet minister.

The correct answer is D, twelfth. Qutb-ud-din Aibak began the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque in 1192, soon after the second battle of Tarain, and the first phase was finished by about 1198, which falls in the last decade of the twelfth century. He laid the foundation of the Qutb Minar beside it in 1199, and Iltutmish completed the minaret. It is counted as the first mosque built in Delhi by the new sultanate, put together with stone taken from earlier temples on the site, which is why its pillars carry older Indian motifs. Iltutmish and later Alauddin Khalji enlarged the courtyard, and the fourth-century iron pillar of Chandra stands within it. Options A, B and C are wrong because the eleventh century is before the sultanate reached Delhi, while the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries cover the later additions rather than the original mosque. Exam tip: Tarain 1192, Quwwat-ul-Islam 1192-98, Qutb Minar begun 1199.

The correct answer is D, lotus. The star-shaped shrine of Gurudwara Shri Hemkund Sahib is built with a roof shaped like an upturned lotus, a flower that also appears in the story of the site. The gurudwara stands in Chamoli district of Uttarakhand at a height of over 4,600 metres, beside a glacial lake ringed by seven peaks called Sapt Shring. It is dedicated to Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh Guru, who describes the place in his composition Bachittar Natak, and the shrine stays open only from about May to October because of snow. Options A, B and C are wrong because the rose, the marigold and the sunflower have no place in the design of this gurudwara; the marigold is used in garlands and the other two are garden flowers. The lotus, on the other hand, is a standing symbol of purity in Indian religious architecture. Exam tip: Hemkund Sahib is in Uttarakhand, near the Valley of Flowers National Park.

The correct answer is A, Ethanol. CH3CH2OH, also written C2H5OH, is ethanol or ethyl alcohol, the second member of the alcohol family. The -OH group attached to the carbon chain is the functional group that makes it an alcohol. Ethanol is a colourless liquid that boils at about 78 degrees Celsius, mixes with water in every proportion, and is used in alcoholic drinks, as a solvent in medicines and in ethanol-blended petrol. Alcohol free of water is called absolute alcohol, while alcohol made unfit for drinking by adding methanol and a dye is called denatured spirit. Option B is wrong because acetic acid, the acid in vinegar, is CH3COOH and carries the -COOH group. Option C is wrong because chloroform is CHCl3, once used as an anaesthetic. Option D is wrong because methane is CH4, the simplest hydrocarbon and the main part of natural gas. Exam tip: -OH means an alcohol and -COOH means a carboxylic acid.