Madhya Pradesh 2023 Previous Year GK Questions with Answers

The correct answer is B, Article 338. Article 338 provides for the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, a constitutional body that investigates and monitors the safeguards given to Scheduled Castes, enquires into specific complaints and reports to the President, who places the report before Parliament. The 65th Constitutional Amendment Act of 1990 replaced the earlier Special Officer for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes with this multi-member Commission, and the 89th Amendment of 2003 divided it, creating a separate National Commission for Scheduled Tribes under Article 338A. A is wrong because Article 332 deals with the reservation of seats for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the state legislative assemblies. C is wrong because Article 342 empowers the President to specify the Scheduled Tribes of a state or union territory. D is wrong because Article 328 concerns a state legislature's power to make laws on elections to its own House. Exam tip: hold the trio together - 338 for SCs, 338A for STs and 338B for backward classes.

The correct answer is D, Ecotone. An ecotone is the transition zone where two different ecosystems meet and mix, such as the belt between a grassland and a forest, an estuary between a river and the sea, or a mangrove strip between land and ocean. It holds species of both neighbouring communities along with a few of its own, so the number of species and their density are often higher in it. This crowding at the edge is called the edge effect, and species found only in such a belt are called edge species. A is wrong because the ecosphere means the whole living world of the earth taken together with its environment. B is wrong because ecoboundary is not a term used in ecology. C is wrong because ecotwin is not an ecological term either. Exam tip: tie ecotone to the edge effect, and keep ecotone, a zone, apart from ecocline, a gradual gradient.

The correct answer is A, Tinkathia system. Under the Tinkathia system the indigo planters of Champaran forced every tenant to grow indigo on three kathas out of every twenty kathas of his holding. Gandhi reached Champaran in Bihar in 1917 at the request of the local cultivator Raj Kumar Shukla, and this became his first satyagraha on Indian soil. The government set up an enquiry committee with Gandhi as a member, and the Champaran Agrarian Act of 1918 ended the Tinkathia system and returned part of the illegal dues to the peasants. B is wrong because the Ryotwari system was a land revenue settlement made directly with the cultivator, mainly in Madras and Bombay. C is wrong because slash and burn is a method of shifting cultivation, not an indigo obligation. D is wrong because the Mahalwari system settled revenue with the whole village, chiefly in the North-Western Provinces and Punjab. Exam tip: pair Champaran 1917 with indigo and the Tinkathia system.

The correct answer is A, Ability to operate 24/7. An online store is a website or an app and not a shop with shutters, so it can take orders at any hour of any day, and that round-the-clock selling is one of the clear gains of e-commerce. The other gains follow from the same fact: a seller reaches buyers anywhere in the country without opening branches, keeps costs down because no showroom or large sales staff is needed, and can study a customer's past orders to suggest goods that suit them. Payment is made by card, net banking or UPI, and the order can be tracked until delivery. B is wrong because e-commerce widens reach instead of limiting it, carrying a small seller to a national market. C is wrong because online sellers personalise the experience closely, using browsing and purchase history to recommend products. D is wrong because operational costs usually fall, since rent, electricity and counter staff are saved. Exam tip: the gains of e-commerce are round-the-clock service, wider reach, lower costs and personalised offers.

The correct answer is C, B2C. Flipkart, Alibaba and Amazon run online marketplaces whose storefronts sell goods to individual shoppers, and a business selling to a consumer is business-to-consumer, or B2C. In this model a firm lists its products on a website or an app, the customer orders and pays online, and the goods reach the home, so the shop, the salesman and the cash counter are all replaced by software. B2C is the commonest face of e-commerce and the one ordinary buyers meet every day. A is wrong because consumer-to-business, C2B, is the reverse case, where an individual offers a service or product to a firm, as a freelance designer or a blogger selling advertising space does. B is wrong because consumer-to-consumer, C2C, means one individual selling to another through a platform such as OLX. D is wrong because business-to-business, B2B, covers a firm selling to another firm, as IndiaMART does. Exam tip: Amazon and Flipkart are B2C, OLX is C2C and IndiaMART is B2B.

The correct answer is D, all of the above, because cyber security is not one activity but a programme that covers all three. Option A by itself is incomplete: compliance means following the rules, standards and laws that apply to the data an organisation holds, and it is only one strand of the work. Option B by itself is incomplete as well: defence against internal threats guards against the employee who misuses access or leaks data, a large share of real incidents, but an organisation that watched only its insiders would still fall to an outside attack. Option C by itself is incomplete too: threat prevention covers firewalls, antivirus, patching and monitoring that stop an attack before it lands. Since each of the three is a genuine part of cyber security and none of them alone is the whole, the combined option is the answer.

The correct answer is B, to block unauthorised access to a network. A firewall sits between a trusted internal network and the untrusted world outside, inspects the traffic crossing it and permits only what its rules allow, dropping the rest; it may be a hardware appliance, a software program or both together. Option A is wrong because unrestricted access is the exact opposite of what a firewall exists to provide, and a network left open in that way needs no firewall at all. Option C is wrong because taking backups is the work of backup software and storage policy; a firewall keeps no copy of data and would not help after a disk failure. Option D is wrong because option B states the purpose correctly. Note the common types for objective questions: packet filtering, stateful inspection and the proxy or application gateway firewall.

The correct answer is A, phishing attack. Phishing sends a message that looks as if it came from a bank, an employer or a government office, and asks the reader to confirm a password, a card number or a one-time password on a page that belongs to the attacker; the target of the attack is the person, not the machine, which is why it is classed as social engineering. Option B is wrong because SQL injection puts database commands into a web form to make the server reveal stored data; the user is not tricked at all. Option C is wrong because a denial of service attack floods a server with requests so that genuine users cannot reach it, which harms availability and steals nothing. Option D is wrong because option A is correct. Remember the family: spear phishing on one person, whaling on an executive, vishing by call, smishing by message.

The correct answer is B, Article 315. Article 315 provides for a Public Service Commission for the Union and a Public Service Commission for each State, and allows two or more States to ask Parliament for a Joint Public Service Commission. It opens Part XIV of the Constitution, which runs from Article 315 to Article 323 and deals with services under the Union and the States. Article 316 covers appointment and tenure, a chairman or member of the UPSC serving six years or till the age of 65 and of a State Commission till 62; Article 317 allows removal only by the President on a report of the Supreme Court; Article 320 lists the functions, mainly conducting examinations and advising on recruitment and discipline. A is wrong because Article 340 lets the President appoint a commission to look into the conditions of backward classes. C is wrong because Article 328 deals with a State legislature's power to make laws on elections to that legislature. D is wrong because Article 238 applied to the old Part B States and was repealed by the Seventh Amendment in 1956. Exam tip: 315 Public Service Commissions, 317 removal, 320 functions, 324 Election Commission.

The correct answer is B, cadmium pollution. Itai-Itai disease was first identified in Japan among people who ate rice grown with water polluted by cadmium from mining waste. Cadmium damages the kidneys and softens the bones, causing fractures and such severe pain that the Japanese name itai-itai means ouch-ouch. Option A is wrong because mercury pollution causes Minamata disease, also first reported in Japan, which attacks the nervous system and causes loss of coordination and speech. Option C is wrong because arsenic in groundwater causes arsenicosis, marked by skin lesions and pigmentation, a serious problem in parts of West Bengal and Bihar. Option D is wrong because excess nitrate in drinking water causes methaemoglobinemia, the blue baby syndrome, in infants. Learn these four pairs together, since examiners almost always place them in the same question.

The correct answer is B, John McCarthy. The American computer scientist John McCarthy is called the father of artificial intelligence because he coined the term itself in his proposal for the Dartmouth summer research project of 1956, the meeting at which the field was born. He also created LISP in 1958, the language in which most early artificial intelligence work was written, argued for time sharing on computers, and received the Turing Award in 1971. Option A is wrong because Alan Turing is honoured as the father of computer science and of the Turing test, which asks whether a machine can be told apart from a person in conversation, but he did not name the subject. Option C is wrong because Blaise Pascal built the Pascaline, a mechanical adding machine, in the seventeenth century. Option D is wrong because Dartmouth is the college where the 1956 conference was held, not a person. Exam tip: McCarthy named artificial intelligence in 1956 and wrote LISP.

The correct answer is D, Ability. Bias in an artificial intelligence system is traced to three sources, the data it learns from, the algorithm that learns, and the people who build and use it; ability is not one of them, because the skill of a model is a measure of how well it performs, not a place where unfairness enters. Data bias appears when the training set leaves out or under-represents a group, as with a face recognition system trained mostly on one kind of face. Algorithmic bias comes from the choices made in designing a model, such as the features it is allowed to use. Human bias enters through labelling, sampling and the assumptions of the team. Options A, B and C are therefore wrong answers to this question because each one is a genuine source of bias. Exam tip: remember data, algorithm and people as the three sources of AI bias.

The correct answer is A, Buffer memory situated between the CPU and RAM. Cache is a small, very fast memory that sits between the processor and the main memory and holds the instructions and data the processor has used most recently. Because reading from RAM is slower than the speed at which the CPU works, the cache saves the processor from waiting, and a request that is served from it is called a cache hit. It is built from static RAM and is arranged in levels, L1 inside the core, then L2 and the shared L3, growing larger and slower at each step. Option B is wrong because ROM holds permanent start-up instructions and is not the memory the cache speeds up. Option C is wrong because the cache serves the CPU, not the path between ROM and RAM. Option D is wrong because MOS names a transistor technology, not a memory unit. Exam tip: speed order registers, cache, RAM, secondary storage.

The correct answer is B, Cadmium pollution. Itai-itai disease is long-term cadmium poisoning, first noticed around 1912 in the Toyama region of Japan, where mines upstream released cadmium into the Jinzu river and it built up in the rice and water used by villagers. Cadmium damages the kidneys and makes bones soft and brittle, so patients suffered repeated fractures and severe pain in the spine and joints; the name means it hurts, it hurts in Japanese. It became one of the four big pollution diseases of Japan. Option A is wrong because mercury pollution causes Minamata disease, also from Japan, which spread through eating fish from a bay polluted with methylmercury. Option C is wrong because arsenic in groundwater causes arsenicosis, with skin lesions and cancers, as seen in West Bengal and Bangladesh. Option D is wrong because too much nitrate in drinking water causes blue baby syndrome, or methaemoglobinaemia, in infants. Exam tip: cadmium–itai-itai, mercury–Minamata, nitrate–blue baby, fluoride–fluorosis.

The correct answer is A, b d a c. Nokrek Biosphere Reserve is in the Garo Hills of Meghalaya; Manas is in Assam along the Bhutan border; Similipal is in Mayurbhanj district of Odisha; and Seshachalam lies in the Eastern Ghats of Andhra Pradesh. Nokrek is valued as a gene pool of wild citrus, Manas is also a tiger reserve and a World Heritage Site, Similipal is known for its tigers and waterfalls, and the Seshachalam hills are home to the red sanders tree. India began creating biosphere reserves under UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere (MAB) programme, and the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, set up in 1986, was the first. Option B is wrong because it places Manas in Odisha and Similipal in Assam. Option C is wrong because it puts Similipal in Andhra Pradesh and Seshachalam in Odisha. Option D is wrong because it swaps the states of Nokrek and Manas. Exam tip: Nokrek–Meghalaya, Manas–Assam, Similipal–Odisha, Seshachalam–Andhra Pradesh, and Nilgiri (1986) the first.

The correct answer is B, Dr. C. Rangarajan. The Twelfth Finance Commission, set up in 2002, was headed by Dr. C. Rangarajan, a former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and its award covered the five years 2005–10. The President sets up a Finance Commission every five years under Article 280 to recommend how central taxes are shared between the Centre and the states and how grants-in-aid are given. The Twelfth Commission is remembered for its debt consolidation and relief facility, which gave states relief on central loans only if they passed fiscal responsibility laws. Option A is wrong because A. M. Khusro chaired the Eleventh Finance Commission, for 2000–05. Option C is wrong because Dr. Vijay Kelkar chaired the Thirteenth Finance Commission, for 2010–15. Option D is wrong because Y. V. Reddy chaired the Fourteenth Finance Commission, for 2015–20, which raised the states’ share of central taxes to 42 per cent. Exam tip: 11th Khusro, 12th Rangarajan, 13th Kelkar, 14th Y. V. Reddy, 15th N. K. Singh.

The correct answer is B, 6. On 15 April 1980 the government nationalised six more private banks, each with deposits of over ₹200 crore, which raised the number of nationalised banks to 20. This was the second round; the first and more famous one came on 19 July 1969, when Indira Gandhi’s government took over 14 major banks with deposits of over ₹50 crore. Both times the aim was to take banking to villages, direct credit to farmers and small industry, and end the hold of big business houses over bank lending. The six banks of 1980 were Andhra Bank, Punjab and Sind Bank, New Bank of India, Vijaya Bank, Corporation Bank and Oriental Bank of Commerce. Option A is wrong because four is not the size of either round. Option C is wrong because 14 banks were nationalised in 1969, not in 1980. Option D is wrong because 20 was the total after both rounds, not the number taken over in 1980. Exam tip: 14 banks in 1969, 6 banks in 1980, 20 in all.

The correct answer is A, Limiting the size of the Council of Ministers. The 91st Amendment Act, 2003 capped the total number of ministers, including the Prime Minister or the Chief Minister, at 15 per cent of the total strength of the Lok Sabha or the state Legislative Assembly. It added clause (1A) to Article 75 for the Union and to Article 164 for the states, and fixed a minimum of 12 ministers in a state. It also barred a member disqualified for defection from holding any ministerial post, and removed the Tenth Schedule exemption for a split by one-third of a party’s members. Option B is wrong because the freeze on seats until the first census after 2026 came through the 84th Amendment of 2001. Option C is wrong because the National Commission for SCs and STs was split into two by the 89th Amendment of 2003. Option D is wrong because option A describes the amendment correctly. Exam tip: 15 per cent ceiling on ministers and a minimum of 12 in a state, both from the 91st Amendment of 2003.

The correct answer is C, Speaker of the Vidhan Sabha. Under Article 199(3), if a question arises whether a bill is a Money Bill, the decision of the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly is final. The Speaker endorses a certificate on the bill before it goes to the Legislative Council, where there is one, and then to the Governor. A Money Bill can be introduced only in the Assembly and only on the Governor’s recommendation, and the Council can hold it back for no more than 14 days. The same rule works at the Centre, where the Lok Sabha Speaker decides under Article 110(3). Option A is wrong because the Chief Minister heads the government but has no role in certifying bills. Option B is wrong because the Governor recommends the introduction of a Money Bill and gives assent to it, but does not decide its nature. Option D is wrong because the Law Minister may advise the government but holds no such power. Exam tip: Money Bill under Article 199 in the states and Article 110 at the Centre; in both, the Speaker’s decision is final.

The correct answer is C, Mahi. The Mahi rises in the Vindhya hills in Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh, flows through the Banswara region of Rajasthan and then crosses Gujarat to fall into the Gulf of Khambhat, so it passes through three states. Like the Narmada, the Tapi and the Sabarmati, it is one of the few Indian rivers that flow west into the Arabian Sea. The Mahi is also known for crossing the Tropic of Cancer twice, a favourite fact of paper setters. Option A is wrong because the Ken flows only through Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, where it joins the Yamuna. Option B is wrong because the Sonar stays within Madhya Pradesh and joins the Ken. Option D is wrong because the Betwa rises in Raisen district and joins the Yamuna in Uttar Pradesh, so it covers only two states. Exam tip: Mahi goes from Dhar through Rajasthan to Gujarat, three states, and crosses the Tropic of Cancer twice.