Delhi 2021 Previous Year GK Questions with Answers

The correct answer is B, liberalisation. Liberalisation means freeing economic activity from government controls: industrial licences, import licences and quantitative restrictions, ceilings on investment and administered interest rates. In India this was the first strand of the reforms of 1991. Option A is wrong because globalisation is the wider integration of a country's economy with the world through trade, investment, technology and movement of people; removing trade barriers helps globalisation but the act itself is liberalisation. Option C is wrong because privatisation is a transfer of ownership or management from the state to private hands, which is a question of who owns a firm rather than of what rules it must follow. Option D is wrong because arbitration is a method of settling disputes outside the courts and has nothing to do with trade policy.

The correct answer is A, .BAT. A batch file is a plain text file containing a series of commands that the operating system carries out one after another without any further instruction from the user, and it is saved with the extension .bat. Such files were the standard way of automating routine work on DOS and on early versions of Windows, the best known of them being autoexec.bat. Option B is wrong because .batch is not a registered extension; classic extensions were limited to three characters and the shortened form is the one that survives. Option C is wrong because .bch is not used for this purpose at all. Option D is wrong because .cth is not a standard file extension in Windows. Remember .bat along with .exe and .com as the three files that can run by themselves.

The correct answer is D, Madurai. Tamil tradition holds that assemblies of poets, called Sangams, met under the patronage of the Pandya kings, and Madurai, the Pandya capital, is the seat remembered in the accounts that survive; the poems collected there form the oldest body of Tamil literature. Option A is wrong because Nagapattinam was a port on the Coromandel coast, known for trade and later for its Buddhist and Christian associations, not for a literary academy. Option B is wrong because Thiruvarur is famous as a temple town and as the birthplace of the great composers of Carnatic music, which belongs to a much later age. Option C is wrong because Thiruvallur lies near the northern edge of Tamil Nadu and has no connection with the Sangam assemblies. The safe pairing to memorise is Madurai with the Pandyas and with the Sangam, and the same city with the burning in the Silappadikaram.

The correct answer is A, hierarchical. The hierarchical model is the first data model used in commercial database software; IBM built its Information Management System on it in the 1960s for the Apollo programme. It arranges records as a tree in which every child record has exactly one parent, so data is reached by moving down a path from the root. Option B is wrong because the object oriented model, which stores objects together with their methods, is the newest of the four and belongs to the late 1980s. Option C is wrong because the deductive model, which adds logical rules to stored facts, came even later and remains mostly a research model. Option D is wrong because the relational model was proposed by Edgar Frank Codd in 1970, after the hierarchical and network models were already in use, though it later replaced both in practice.

The correct answer is D, the Treaty of Mandeshwar. The Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817 to 1818 was settled by a set of separate treaties with the Maratha houses, and the one with the Holkar chief of Indore was signed at Mandsaur, or Mandeshwar, in January 1818. It placed Holkar territory under the Company and ended Holkar independence. Option A is wrong because the Treaty of Purandar of 1665 was signed by Shivaji with Mirza Raja Jai Singh, long before the Company mattered in the Deccan. Option B is wrong because the Treaty of Gwalior of 1817 was signed with Daulat Rao Scindia, not with Holkar, and students often swap the two houses. Option C is wrong because the Treaty of Surat of 1775 was made with Raghunath Rao and actually began the First Anglo-Maratha War.

The correct answer is A, General Packet Radio Service. GPRS was added to the 2G cellular system so that the same radio channel could carry data in packets instead of holding a circuit open the way a voice call does. Because the user is charged for the volume of data rather than for the minutes of connection, it was called an always-on service, and it made mobile browsing, WAP pages and picture messaging possible; the faster EDGE and then 3G grew out of it. Option B is wrong because the R stands for radio, the medium used, not for route. Option C is wrong because the unit of data in this system is a packet, and package is not a networking term here. Option D is wrong because radiation has nothing to do with the expansion; it only resembles the word radio and is placed there as a distractor.

The correct answer is D, Philippines. The Asian Development Bank was founded in 1966 to lend for development in Asia and the Pacific and has its headquarters at Manila, the capital of the Philippines. India is a founding member and among its largest borrowers. Japan and the United States hold the largest shares in the bank, and its president has by convention always been Japanese.

Option A, Malaysia, hosts no such bank at Kuala Lumpur, although the city holds regional offices of several bodies. Option B, Indonesia, is the seat of the ASEAN Secretariat at Jakarta, which is a different institution. Option C, Thailand, hosts the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific at Bangkok, and the Bangkok Declaration of 1967 created ASEAN, so it is a plausible but wrong choice here.

The correct answer is B, Moral Suasion. The tools of the Reserve Bank are divided into quantitative tools, which change the total amount of credit in the system, and qualitative or selective tools, which change the direction in which that credit flows. Moral suasion is the qualitative tool by which the Reserve Bank persuades banks through letters, meetings and advice, for example to lend less to a speculative sector, without issuing a binding order. The other qualitative tools are margin requirements, selective credit control, rationing of credit and direct action.

Option A, the bank rate, is the rate at which the Reserve Bank lends to banks without collateral, and changing it changes the cost of credit for everyone, so it is quantitative. Option C, open market operations, adds or removes money by buying or selling government securities, which is also quantitative. Option D, the cash reserve ratio, fixes how much of its deposits a bank must keep with the Reserve Bank, again a quantitative measure.

The correct answer is C, I, II and III. All three belong to the monetary policy toolkit of the Reserve Bank of India. SLR, the Statutory Liquidity Ratio, is the part of its deposits that a bank must keep with itself in cash, gold or approved securities, and raising or lowering it changes how much a bank can lend. MSS, the Market Stabilisation Scheme, allows the Reserve Bank to absorb lasting surplus liquidity by issuing special treasury bills and dated securities. The corridor is the band formed by the standing facility rates around the policy repo rate, within which the overnight call money rate is expected to move.

Options A, B and D each leave out one of the three. They test whether a candidate treats the corridor as a mere description rather than as a working instrument, and whether the Market Stabilisation Scheme is remembered at all, since it is used only when liquidity is in lasting surplus.

The correct answer is C, Arabian sea. Lakshadweep is a group of small coral islands, atolls and reefs lying off the Malabar coast of Kerala in the Arabian Sea, built on a submarine ridge. It is the smallest union territory of India by area, and Kavaratti is its administrative headquarters.

Option A, the Bay of Bengal, holds India's other island group, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which are of volcanic and tectonic origin rather than coral, so the two are easy to swap in a hurry. Option B, the Pacific Ocean, lies far to the east of Asia and washes no part of India. Option D, the Atlantic Ocean, lies on the other side of Africa and has no Indian territory in it at all. Remember the simple pair: coral Lakshadweep in the Arabian Sea in the west, volcanic Andaman and Nicobar in the Bay of Bengal in the east.

The correct answer is A, Maharashtra. The Kanheri caves are cut into a basalt hill inside the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai. They are a Buddhist group of more than a hundred cells, chaityas and viharas cut over several centuries from about the first century BCE, with rock-cut cisterns and a large chaitya hall with stupa and standing Buddha figures.

Option B, Odisha, has Buddhist sites at Ratnagiri, Udayagiri and Lalitgiri, but these are brick monasteries and stupas, not the Kanheri caves. Option C, Rajasthan, has no major Buddhist rock-cut group; its heritage is fort and temple architecture in stone. Option D, Delhi, has no ancient rock-cut caves at all. Maharashtra is the home of Indian rock-cut architecture and also holds Ajanta, Ellora, Bhaja, Karle, Bedsa and Elephanta.

The correct answer is A, Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for Gitanjali, the English rendering of his own Bengali poems. He was the first Indian and also the first person from Asia to be awarded a Nobel Prize in any category, and the prize brought Indian writing to the notice of readers across Europe.

Option B, Mother Teresa, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, sixty six years later, for her work among the poor and the dying in Kolkata. Option C, Amartya Sen, won the prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for his work on welfare economics and famines. Option D, C. V. Raman, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for the scattering of light known as the Raman Effect, which makes him the first Indian to win a Nobel in the sciences but still seventeen years after Tagore.

The correct answer is D, Karnataka. The pre-monsoon thundery showers of Karnataka are called cherry blossom showers or blossom showers because they help the coffee plants of the Kodagu, Chikkamagaluru and Hassan belt to flower. The same family of pre-monsoon showers is called mango showers in Kerala and coastal Karnataka because it helps mangoes ripen, and the two names are often asked together.

Option A, Gujarat, has no such local shower in the standard list. Option B, Meghalaya, is known for the heaviest rainfall of the country at Mawsynram and Cherrapunji, but that rain comes from the Bay of Bengal branch of the monsoon. Option C, Uttarakhand, receives winter precipitation from western disturbances and monsoon rain in summer, and neither is called a blossom shower.

The correct answer is C, both I and II. The Reserve Bank is banker to banks: every scheduled bank keeps an account with it, holds its cash reserve ratio there, settles payments with other banks through those accounts and can borrow from it when short of funds. It is also the currency issuing authority, with the sole right to issue currency notes in India under the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934.

Option A is wrong because it leaves out note issue, which is the function the Bank is best known for. Option D is wrong because it leaves out the banker to banks role, from which the description lender of last resort follows. Option B is wrong on both counts. The one refinement worth remembering is that the one rupee note and all coins are issued by the Government of India, although the Reserve Bank puts them into circulation, and that the Bank is also banker to the Government.