Delhi 2019 Previous Year GK Questions with Answers

The correct answer is D, Padma Bhushan. The Indian civilian honours run in a fixed order of precedence: the Bharat Ratna first, then Padma Vibhushan, then Padma Bhushan and then Padma Shri. Counting from the top, Padma Bhushan is therefore the third highest, and it is given for distinguished service of a high order in any field. Option A, Padma Vibhushan, is the second highest, awarded for exceptional and distinguished service, and is the option most often chosen by candidates who forget to count the Bharat Ratna. Option B, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, is the highest honour in Indian cinema and is given by the government for lifetime contribution to film; it is outside the civilian order of precedence altogether. Option C, the Arjuna Award, belongs to sport and recognises consistently outstanding performance over several years, so it too is a field award rather than a general civilian honour.

The correct answer is B, African-Asian. There is no language family by that name in India. The Afro-Asiatic family, which the name echoes, covers Arabic, Hebrew and the Berber and Cushitic languages of West Asia and North Africa, and no Indian language belongs to it. Option A is wrong because the Tibeto-Burman family, a branch of the Sino-Tibetan family, is very much present in India and covers Manipuri, Bodo, Lepcha, Ladakhi and the Naga languages of the north-east. Option C is wrong because the Dravidian family is the second largest family in the country and covers Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tulu and Gondi. Option D is wrong because the Austro-Asiatic or Munda family is spoken in Jharkhand, Odisha and Meghalaya and covers Santali, Mundari, Ho and Khasi. The families actually found in India are Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman, and the small Andamanese and Tai-Kadai groups.

The correct answer is A, football. An offside trap is a defensive tactic in which the defenders move up the field together at the right moment so that an attacking player is left beyond the last defender when the ball is played forward, and the referee then gives offside. The tactic exists only because football has an offside law. Option B is wrong because badminton has no offside rule; its terms are smash, drop shot, lob and deuce. Option C is wrong because tennis is played across a net with the players in separate courts, so there is no line to be caught behind; its terms are love, deuce, ace and let. Option D is wrong because table tennis is also a net game with its own terms such as chop, loop and let. Hockey has an offside rule in its older form, but the trap as a named tactic is asked for football.

The correct answer is A, Guru Angad Dev. The second Guru standardised and popularised Gurmukhi, the script in which the hymns of the Gurus were written down, and this made it possible to preserve the teaching of the movement in the language its followers actually spoke. Option B, Guru Amar Das, the third Guru, is remembered for strengthening the langar, the free community kitchen where people of all castes ate together, and for organising the manji system of preaching centres. Option C, Guru Ram Das, the fourth Guru, founded the city of Amritsar. Option D, Guru Nanak Dev, the first Guru and founder of the faith, preached one formless God, the remembrance of the divine name and honest labour, and travelled widely on his udasis, but the script itself is credited to his successor.

The correct answer is B, Humayun, Akbar, Jehangir, Shah Jahan. The Mughal throne passed from Babur, who ruled from 1526 to 1530, to his son Humayun from 1530 to 1540 and again from 1555 to 1556, then to Akbar from 1556 to 1605, to Jahangir from 1605 to 1627, to Shah Jahan from 1628 to 1658 and to Aurangzeb from 1658 to 1707. Option B places four of these in exactly that order and is therefore correct. Option A is wrong because it puts Jahangir, a grandson of Humayun, before both Akbar and Humayun. Option C is wrong because it reverses the line completely, beginning with Shah Jahan and ending with his great-grandfather Humayun. Option D is wrong because Humayun ruled before Akbar, not after Shah Jahan, and Jahangir came before Shah Jahan rather than last. Fixing the six reigns in order is the safest preparation for this question type.

The correct answer is C, Tons. The Tons is a tributary of the Yamuna in the Ganga system, rising in the Garhwal Himalaya, and has nothing to do with the Brahmaputra basin. Option A is wrong as an answer because the Teesta, which drains Sikkim and north Bengal, does join the Brahmaputra, doing so in Bangladesh. Option B is wrong because the Siang, also called the Dihang, is the name the Brahmaputra itself carries in Arunachal Pradesh and is treated as its head stream, so it belongs to the system. Option D is wrong because the Manas, which comes down from Bhutan through the Manas national park, is one of the major north-bank tributaries of the Brahmaputra in Assam. The other tributaries worth remembering are the Subansiri, the Kameng, the Dibang and the Lohit, the last two giving the river its Assam name at Sadiya.

The correct answer is D, Jahangir. The Shalimar Bagh on the bank of the Dal lake in Srinagar was laid out by Jahangir in 1619 for his queen Nur Jahan. It is a Mughal garden in the charbagh plan, built in rising terraces fed by a central water channel, with pavilions and cascades, and it shows how far the Mughals carried the Persian idea of a garden as a picture of paradise. Jahangir loved Kashmir and the Nishat Bagh nearby belongs to the same period.

Option A, Azam Shah, was a son of Aurangzeb and is linked with the Bibi ka Maqbara at Aurangabad, not with Kashmir. Option B, Akbar, annexed Kashmir in 1586 and built the Hari Parbat fort wall there, but not this garden. Option C, Humayun, spent his reign in war and exile and left no garden of this kind. The Shalimar Bagh belongs to Jahangir.

The correct answer is A, only (i) is false. Statement (i) is wrong because Ctrl + N opens a brand new, empty presentation; the key that inserts a new slide into the open presentation is Ctrl + M. Statement (ii) is true: PowerPoint 2016 can save or export a presentation as a PDF through Save As or Export, a facility Office has carried since the 2007 version.

Option B says only (ii) is false, which reverses the position of the two statements. Option C claims both are false, but the PDF facility plainly exists in PowerPoint 2016. Option D says neither is false, which would make Ctrl + N a slide-inserting key and is exactly the confusion the paper setter is testing. Remember the pair: Ctrl + N for a new file, Ctrl + M for one more slide.

The correct answer is B, Gift tax. A gift tax is charged on the transfer of money or property from one person to another without consideration; it is a tax on a transfer between persons, not on any sale of goods or supply of services. India abolished the gift tax in 1998, and gifts above the prescribed limit are now taxed in the hands of the receiver as income from other sources.

Option A, sales tax, was the tax states levied on the sale of goods before value added tax and then GST took its place. Option C, luxury tax, was levied by states on hotel accommodation and similar services and has been subsumed into GST. Option D, sin tax, is the general name for a heavy levy on goods considered harmful, such as tobacco and liquor, and in the GST era it appears as the compensation cess on demerit goods. All three of these are levied with reference to goods or services, so only the gift tax stands apart.

The correct answer is B, 11. A new blank document in Microsoft Word 2016 opens in the Calibri font at a size of 11 points, and the same pair of defaults is used from Word 2007 through Word 2019. The setting can be seen in the Font group of the Home tab the moment a new document is created, and it can be altered for every future document through the Font dialog box by choosing the font and the size and then clicking Set As Default.

Option A, 10 points, is not the default of any Word version in common use. Option C, 12 points, is the size many offices and universities insist on for a printed report, and it was the default size of the older Times New Roman default in Word 2003, which is why it is the favourite distractor here. Option D, 14 points, is a heading size a user applies by hand and is never the default body size.

The correct answer is C, Kanishka. Ashvaghosha was a Buddhist monk and Sanskrit poet at the court of the Kushana ruler Kanishka I. He wrote the Buddhacharita, a life of the Buddha in Sanskrit verse, and the Saundarananda, and he acted as deputy to Vasumitra at the Fourth Buddhist Council held in Kashmir. Kanishka's court also held the physician Charaka and the philosopher Nagarjuna, and the group is a favourite one-line question.

Option A, Ashoka, ruled in the third century BCE, about three hundred years earlier, and is linked with Moggaliputta Tissa and the Third Buddhist Council. Option B, Bindusara, was Ashoka's father and received the Greek ambassador Deimachus, not Ashvaghosha. Option D, Gautamiputra Satakarni, was the Satavahana king praised in the Nasik prashasti and had no connection with the Buddhacharita.