Delhi 2020 Previous Year GK Questions with Answers

The correct answer is D, Gautam Buddha. The eightfold path or ashtangika marga is the fourth of the noble truths preached by the Buddha in his first sermon at Sarnath, and it names the middle way between indulgence and mortification: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. Option A, Shankaracharya, taught Advaita Vedanta, in which liberation comes from the knowledge that Brahman alone is real; he set out no eightfold path. Option B, Mahavir Swami, taught the triratna of right faith, right knowledge and right conduct and five great vows, so his scheme is threefold and fivefold, not eightfold. Option C, Ramanuja, taught Vishishtadvaita and the path of devotion or prapatti. Candidates also confuse this path with the eight limbs of Patanjali's yoga, which are yama to samadhi and belong to a different tradition.

The correct answer is D, State Bank of India. YONO, which stands for You Only Need One, was launched by the State Bank of India as a single application for banking, investment, insurance and online shopping, and it also allows cash withdrawal at the bank's machines without a card. Option A is wrong because HDFC Bank offers its own mobile banking and payment applications under different names. Option B is wrong because Punjab National Bank runs its own digital platform and is not connected with YONO. Option C is wrong because ICICI Bank has its own application as well. Questions on bank applications are answered by holding the app and the bank together as a pair, exactly as the folk forms are held with their states in another subject.

The correct answer is B, Nizamuddin Auliya. Amir Khusrau served as a poet at the courts of several Delhi Sultans, but his spiritual allegiance was to Nizamuddin Auliya, and he was buried beside his master. He is called the Tuti-i-Hind, the parrot of India, wrote works such as the Khazain-ul-Futuh and the Nuh Sipihr, composed in the early Hindavi speech from which Hindi and Urdu grew, and tradition credits him with shaping qawwali. Option A, Fariduddin Ganjshakar, was the master of Nizamuddin Auliya himself and belongs to an earlier generation at Ajodhan. Option C, Shaikh Salim Chishti, lived in the sixteenth century at Sikri, where Akbar built Fatehpur Sikri near his hospice, three centuries after Khusrau. Option D does not belong to the line of Chishti masters that examiners test.

The correct answer is A, 1992. SEBI first appeared in April 1988 as an administrative arrangement with no legal powers, and it became a statutory regulator when the Securities and Exchange Board of India Act was passed in 1992; the words quoted in the question are taken from the preamble of that Act, which speaks of protecting investors, promoting the development of the securities market and regulating it. Because the statutory body dates from the Act, 1992 is the year every examination expects. Option B, 1999, is the year the Central Depository Services Limited was set up, the second depository in India. Option C, 1987, and option D, 1985, come before even the administrative body existed. Keep the sequence in mind: the Securities Contracts (Regulation) Act of 1956, SEBI as an administrative body in 1988, the SEBI Act in 1992 and the Depositories Act in 1996.

The correct answer is B, Karnataka. Jog Falls is formed by the Sharavathi river where it drops off the edge of the Western Ghats in the Shivamogga district of Karnataka, and it falls in four separate streams traditionally named Raja, Rani, Rocket and Roarer. It is a segmented fall rather than a single plunge, and its flow depends on releases from the Linganamakki reservoir upstream. Option A, Uttarakhand, is a Himalayan state whose famous water features are glaciers and the sources of the Ganga and Yamuna rather than plateau-edge falls. Option C, Jharkhand, does have falls such as Hundru and Dassam on the Chota Nagpur plateau, but not Jog. Option D, Sikkim, has small Himalayan cascades. Remember that Karnataka also has Kunchikal on the Varahi, which is counted as the highest waterfall in India.

The correct answer is A, Karnataka. The Gol Gumbaz stands at Bijapur, now called Vijayapura, in Karnataka. It is the tomb of Muhammad Adil Shah of the Adil Shahi dynasty of Bijapur and was completed in the middle of the seventeenth century. Its dome is one of the largest masonry domes in the world and rests on interlocking arches without any supporting pillars inside, leaving a single vast chamber. The gallery running around the base of the dome is famous as the whispering gallery, where a low sound is repeated several times.

Option B, Tamil Nadu, is the land of Dravida temple building, not of the Deccan sultanates. Option C, Kerala, has its own timber and tiled roof tradition. Option D, Telangana, does hold Qutb Shahi work such as the Charminar and the Golconda fort, but the Adil Shahi capital was Bijapur in Karnataka, so D is the trap option here.

The correct answer is D, Bahlul Khan Lodhi. Bahlul Khan Lodi, an Afghan noble and governor of Sirhind, took the throne of Delhi in 1451 after the last Sayyid ruler Alauddin Alam Shah withdrew to Badaun. His line was the first Afghan dynasty to rule Delhi and the last of the five Sultanate dynasties. Option A is wrong because Daulat Khan Lodi was the governor of Punjab who invited Babur to invade India; he did not found the dynasty. Option B is wrong because Sikandar Lodi was Bahlul's son and successor, the ruler who founded the city of Agra in 1504 and made it his capital. Option C is wrong because Ibrahim Lodi was the last ruler of the dynasty, defeated by Rana Sanga at Khatoli in 1517 and killed by Babur at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526.

The correct answer is C, 1949. The Reserve Bank of India began as a shareholders' bank and was taken into public ownership on 1 January 1949 under the Reserve Bank (Transfer to Public Ownership) Act, 1948. Since then the entire capital has been held by the Government of India, although the Bank continues to be run by a Central Board under its own Act of 1934.

Option A, 1971, is the year in which the Bank's insurance related subsidiary work expanded and is close to the 1969 bank nationalisation, so it is placed to confuse. Option B, 1956, is the year the Imperial Bank of India became the State Bank of India, which candidates often mix up with this event. Option D, 1935, is the year the Reserve Bank began operations, on 1 April, under the Act of 1934, and is the commonest wrong answer of the four.

The correct answer is C, Habib Tanvir. He was a playwright, director and actor of the modern Indian theatre, best known for Charandas Chor and for working with folk performers of Chhattisgarh in his company Naya Theatre. He belongs to drama, not to painting, so he is the odd one out.

Option A, Tyeb Mehta, was a painter of the Progressive Artists Group generation, known for his diagonal canvases and the Falling Figure and Mahishasura series. Option B, Jamini Roy, was a Bengal painter who left academic realism for the bold flat line of Kalighat painting and folk art of Bengal. Option D, Satish Gujral, was a painter, sculptor and muralist who also designed the Belgian Embassy building in New Delhi, so painting is one of his fields. Questions of this kind slip one name from theatre, music or sculpture into a list of painters.

The correct answer is C, Text. LEN returns the number of characters in an entry, counting letters, digits, punctuation and spaces alike, so =LEN("Excel") gives 5. Because it works on text rather than on values, Excel files it under the Text category of the Formulas tab, along with LEFT, RIGHT, MID, UPPER, LOWER, TRIM and CONCATENATE.

Option A, Financial, holds the money functions such as PMT, RATE, NPV and FV, which work out instalments, interest rates and present values. Option B, Logical, holds IF, AND, OR, NOT and IFERROR, the functions that test a condition and return one result or another. Option D, Math and Trig, holds SUM, ROUND, ABS, SQRT, POWER and MOD, which calculate on numbers. LEN does return a number, and that is the trap that pulls candidates towards D, but a function is classified by what it works on, and LEN works on text.

The correct answer is A, Title bar. The title bar is the strip along the very top of the Excel window, and it carries the name of the open workbook followed by the name of the program, for example Book1 - Excel. The minimise, maximise and close buttons sit at its right end, and the Quick Access Toolbar at its left.

Option B, the tool bar, holds command buttons rather than names; in Excel 2007 and later it survives only as the small Quick Access Toolbar. Option C, the task bar, belongs to the Windows operating system and not to Excel; it runs along the bottom of the screen and shows the Start button and the programs that are open. Option D, the menu bar, was the row of word menus of Excel 2003 and earlier, replaced by the ribbon from Excel 2007; it listed commands such as File and Edit, never the file name. The cell address, by contrast, is shown in the Name Box beside the formula bar.

The correct answer is B, Hindi. The Vyas Samman was instituted in 1991 by the K. K. Birla Foundation and is given for an outstanding literary work in Hindi published in the previous ten years. Its first recipient was the critic and scholar Ram Vilas Sharma.

Option A, Rajasthani, is the language of the foundation's Bihari Puraskar, which is open to a writer from Rajasthan writing in either Hindi or Rajasthani, and that overlap is what makes this option tempting. Option C, Sanskrit, has no award of its own from this foundation, though a Sanskrit writer is eligible for the Saraswati Samman because Sanskrit is in the Eighth Schedule. Option D, Konkani, is likewise covered by the Saraswati Samman rather than by the Vyas Samman. The clean distinction to carry into the exam is that the Vyas Samman is for Hindi alone while the Saraswati Samman, instituted by the same foundation in the same year, is open to every Eighth Schedule language.

The correct answer is C, Ctrl + click. Holding the Ctrl key and clicking anywhere inside a sentence selects that whole sentence, from its first letter to the full stop that ends it, and the selected sentence can then be deleted, moved or formatted in one action. The selection shortcuts form a ladder: a double click selects a word, a Ctrl + click selects a sentence, a triple click selects the whole paragraph and Ctrl + A selects the entire document.

Option A, Alt with a click, does not select a sentence; Alt held down while dragging selects a rectangular block of text running down several lines. Option B, a single click, only places the insertion point at that spot and selects nothing at all. Option D, a double click, selects the single word under the pointer, which is the step below a sentence on the same ladder.

The correct answer is B, Chandragupta I. The first two members of the family, Sri Gupta and Ghatotkacha, used only the modest title Maharaja, which historians read as a sign that they were subordinate rulers. Chandragupta I was the first to assume the imperial title Maharajadhiraja, king of great kings, and the Gupta era of 319 to 320 CE is counted from his accession. His marriage to the Lichchhavi princess Kumaradevi is celebrated on the king and queen type gold coins.

Option A, Ramagupta, is a shadowy figure known mainly from the play Devichandraguptam and a few inscriptions, and he never raised the family's status. Option C, Samudragupta, was Chandragupta I's son and inherited the imperial title rather than introducing it. Option D, Skandagupta, ruled almost a century and a half later and is remembered for checking the Hunas.

The correct answer is D, Akbar. He built Fatehpur Sikri in the Agra district of present day Uttar Pradesh in the sixteenth century and made it his capital, naming it after his victory in Gujarat. The city holds the Buland Darwaza, the Jama Masjid, the Panch Mahal and the tomb of Salim Chishti, and it was abandoned after a few years, which is why it survives so completely. It is on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Option A, Babur, founded the dynasty after the first battle of Panipat in 1526 and ruled from Agra, not from Sikri. Option B, Humayun, lost the empire to Sher Shah Suri and regained it shortly before his death, and built nothing of this kind. Option C, Jahangir, was Akbar's son and was born at Sikri, which is the reason the place is often wrongly credited to him; he ruled from Agra and Lahore.

The correct answer is A, 1975. The rupee was tied to the pound sterling from colonial times and stayed pegged to it after independence. In 1975 the link was cut and the rupee was tied instead to a basket of currencies of India's major trading partners, with the Reserve Bank fixing the daily rate. The step was taken because the pound itself had become unstable after the breakdown of the fixed exchange rate system in the early 1970s.

Option B, 1947, is independence, when the sterling link was retained. Option D, 1963, belongs to no exchange rate change; the two devaluations students confuse it with are 1949 and 1966. Option C, 1982, is the year NABARD and the EXIM Bank were set up, not an exchange rate landmark. The basket peg lasted until the reforms of 1991 to 1993, when India moved to a market determined exchange rate.