State Exams 2018 Previous Year GK Questions with Answers

The correct answer is A, National Green Tribunal. The National Green Tribunal was set up under the National Green Tribunal Act of 2010 to settle cases on the environment, forests, water, air and biodiversity quickly, and India thus became one of the first countries in the world to create a special court of this kind. Its principal bench sits at New Delhi, with other benches at Bhopal, Pune, Kolkata and Chennai, and it is expected to dispose of a case within six months of filing. The Tribunal is not bound by the Code of Civil Procedure and follows the principles of natural justice, applying the polluter pays principle, the precautionary principle and the idea of sustainable development. It can order compensation, restoration of the environment and the closing of a polluting unit. B, C and D are wrong because they are invented expansions; no body of any of those names exists, and the word in the title is Tribunal, a court-like body, not Tribe. Exam tip: NGT Act 2010, principal bench New Delhi, cases to be decided in six months.

The correct answer is B, France. Le Corbusier is counted as a French architect. He was born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in Switzerland in 1887, settled in Paris, took French citizenship in 1930 and worked from France for the rest of his life. Jawaharlal Nehru brought him to India to plan Chandigarh, the shared capital of Punjab and Haryana, after the first planner Albert Mayer and his architect Matthew Nowicki left the project. Le Corbusier laid the city out in numbered sectors on a grid and designed the Capitol Complex in Sector 1 — the High Court, the Secretariat, the Legislative Assembly and the Open Hand monument — which UNESCO added to its World Heritage list in 2016. Option A is wrong because Germany is the home of the Bauhaus school and Walter Gropius, not of Le Corbusier. Option C is wrong because Italy is linked with Renaissance architects such as Brunelleschi and Palladio. Option D is wrong because Spain is known for Antoni Gaudí of Barcelona. Exam tip: Chandigarh — Le Corbusier; New Delhi — Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker.

The correct answer is B, Pulmonary artery. The pulmonary artery is the one artery in the body that carries deoxygenated blood. It leaves the right ventricle and takes blood that has returned from the body's tissues to the lungs, where carbon dioxide is given up and fresh oxygen is picked up. This makes it the standard exception to the rule that arteries carry oxygen-rich blood away from the heart while veins bring oxygen-poor blood back. Option A is wrong because the pulmonary vein is the matching exception on the other side: it is the only vein carrying oxygenated blood, from the lungs into the left atrium. Option C is wrong because the aorta is the largest artery of the body and carries oxygenated blood from the left ventricle to every organ. Option D is wrong because capillaries are the fine exchange vessels in the tissues, holding oxygenated blood at the arterial end and deoxygenated blood at the venous end, so they cannot be named for one kind. Exam tip: pulmonary artery — deoxygenated, pulmonary vein — oxygenated; the two exceptions.

The correct answer is C, Fundamental Rights. Article 226 gives every High Court the power to issue writs for the enforcement of Fundamental Rights. The five writs are habeas corpus, mandamus, prohibition, certiorari and quo warranto. Article 226 is in fact wider than Article 32, because a High Court may issue these writs both for Fundamental Rights and 'for any other purpose', which covers ordinary legal rights as well, while the Supreme Court's power under Article 32 is confined to Fundamental Rights. The other difference is that Article 32 is itself a Fundamental Right and cannot be taken away, whereas the power under Article 226 is not. Option A is wrong because ordinary civil rights are enforced through civil suits in the regular courts. Option B is wrong because 'sanctioning rights' is not a category the Constitution knows. Option D is wrong because children's rights come from statutes such as the Juvenile Justice Act and bodies like the NCPCR, not from Article 226. Exam tip: Article 32 — Supreme Court, Fundamental Rights only; Article 226 — High Court, wider reach.

The correct answer is B, absolute pressure. Pressure counted from a perfect vacuum as the zero point is called absolute pressure. A perfect vacuum holds no gas and exerts no pressure, so it is the true zero of any pressure scale. The working relation is absolute pressure = gauge pressure + atmospheric pressure, and atmospheric pressure at sea level is about 101.3 kilopascals, or 760 mm of mercury. So a tyre whose gauge reads 200 kPa is really at about 301 kPa absolute. Gas laws and thermodynamic formulas always take absolute pressure, which is why the distinction is tested. Option A is wrong because gauge pressure takes atmospheric pressure as its zero, so an open gauge reads zero even though air is pressing on it. Option C is wrong because atmospheric pressure is the weight of the air column itself, read on a barometer. Option D is wrong because 'absolute zero pressure' names the vacuum, the reference point, not the reading taken from it. Exam tip: absolute = gauge + atmospheric; a reading below atmospheric is vacuum or negative gauge pressure.

The correct answer is C, 5 States. India's Standard Meridian, 82°30′E, crosses five states on its way south. Indian Standard Time is fixed by the local time of this meridian, which passes close to Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh, so IST is 5 hours 30 minutes ahead of Greenwich Mean Time. Running south from Mirzapur, the meridian goes through Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh before reaching the Bay of Bengal. One meridian was chosen for the whole country because India spans about 30 degrees of longitude, so the sun rises at Kibithu in Arunachal Pradesh nearly two hours before it rises in Gujarat. Option A is wrong because seven would mean adding states such as Telangana or Tamil Nadu, which this meridian does not touch. Option B is wrong because three would leave out Odisha and Andhra Pradesh in the south. Option D is wrong because six is one too many; no sixth state lies on 82°30′E. Exam tip: 82°30′E, five states, UP–MP–Chhattisgarh–Odisha–Andhra Pradesh, IST = GMT + 5:30.

The correct answer is C, Netscape. Netscape Navigator, released in 1994 by Netscape Communications, the company founded by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark, was the first web browser sold as a commercial product. It was the browser that carried the web to ordinary users in the mid nineties and at its peak held most of the market, before losing the browser war to Internet Explorer. A is wrong because Mosaic, built in 1993 at the NCSA of the University of Illinois, was the first widely used graphical browser but was academic software given away free, not a commercial product. B is wrong because Mozilla is the open source project born in 1998 from Netscape's released source code; its browser Firefox came in 2004 and is free. D is wrong because Internet Explorer arrived in 1995 and was bundled free with Windows rather than sold. Exam tip: Mosaic 1993 first popular graphical browser, Netscape Navigator 1994 first commercial browser, Firefox 2004 from the Mozilla project.

The correct answer is A, REL. An external stylesheet is attached to a page with a link tag written inside the head section, and the tag needs two things: href, which gives the address of the CSS file, and rel, which tells the browser what the linked file is for. Writing rel equals stylesheet is what marks the file as a set of style rules; leave rel out and the browser has no reason to treat the file as CSS, so the page appears unstyled. B is wrong because style is a separate way of writing CSS, either as a style block in the head or as an attribute on one element, and it has no part in linking an external file. C is wrong because body holds the visible content of the page while the link tag belongs in the head. D is wrong because html is the root element that wraps the whole document and has nothing to do with loading a stylesheet. Exam tip: link rel equals stylesheet with href, placed in the head.

The correct answer is C, Hepatitis B. The hepatitis B vaccine was the first vaccine made by recombinant DNA technology. Scientists cut out the gene for the surface protein of the hepatitis B virus and put it into yeast cells; the yeast then made that protein in large amounts, and the purified protein is injected as the vaccine. Because only one viral protein is used and no whole virus is involved, the vaccine cannot cause the disease, which is what makes recombinant vaccines safe. It was licensed in the mid 1980s and in India it is part of the pentavalent shot given to infants. A is wrong because the polio vaccine is either the killed virus of Salk or the weakened live virus of Sabin. B is wrong because no vaccine against AIDS has been licensed so far. D is wrong because the smallpox vaccine used the live vaccinia virus, and the disease was declared eradicated in 1980. Exam tip: hepatitis B, first recombinant vaccine, made in yeast from the surface antigen gene.

The correct answer is C, Graphics. In multimedia, graphics is the broad word for every kind of visual element a computer can store and show, so drawings, photographs, movies and simulations all sit inside it. The usual list of multimedia elements is text, graphics, audio, video and animation, and in that list graphics covers both pictures made by hand on the screen and pictures captured from the real world. Graphics are stored either as bitmaps, made of pixels, as in a JPEG or BMP photograph, or as vectors, made of lines and curves described by equations, as in a drawing or a CAD file. A is wrong because animation is only one kind of visual, a sequence of frames shown fast enough to look like movement. B is wrong because an image is a single still picture, so it is narrower than the four things listed. D is wrong because text is made of characters and carries no picture. Exam tip: multimedia elements are text, graphics, audio, video and animation; bitmap graphics use pixels, vector graphics use equations.

The correct answer is A, Physical Layer. The OSI model has seven layers and they are numbered from the bottom upwards, so Layer 1 is the physical layer, the one that actually carries bits over a copper cable, an optical fibre or a radio link. It fixes voltages, connectors, pin layouts, cable types and data rates, and it has nothing to do with the meaning of the data it carries. The full order from Layer 1 to Layer 7 is physical, data link, network, transport, session, presentation and application. B is wrong because the data link layer is Layer 2, which groups bits into frames and handles MAC addresses and error detection on one link. C is wrong because the transport layer is Layer 4, where TCP and UDP move data from end to end. D is wrong because the network layer is Layer 3, the layer of IP addresses and routing. Exam tip: the sentence Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away gives physical, data link, network, transport, session, presentation, application in order.

The correct answer is A, Attack Surface. The attack surface of a system is the total collection of every point at which an unauthorised person could try to enter it or pull data out of it: open ports, running services, user accounts, login pages, removable drives and even the employees who can be tricked. Network administrators reduce risk by shrinking this surface, that is by closing unused ports and removing software that is not needed. Option B is wrong because an attack signature is the recognisable pattern of bytes or behaviour by which antivirus and intrusion detection software identify a known attack. Option C is wrong because an attack pattern is a general description of how a class of attacks is carried out, used while designing defences. Option D is wrong because an attack path, also called an attack vector chain, is the particular route a single intruder actually followed from entry to target, not the whole set of possible entry points.

The correct answer is B, Krishna Devaraya. Krishnadevaraya of the Tuluva dynasty ruled from 1509 to 1529 and his reign is treated as the golden age of Vijayanagara: the Raichur doab was won back, Odisha's Gajapati ruler was humbled, Telugu literature flourished under the eight court poets called the Ashtadiggajas, and the Vitthalaswamy and Hazara Rama temples were raised. He himself wrote the Telugu work Amuktamalyada. Option A is wrong because Vira Narasimha, his half-brother and predecessor, ruled only briefly from 1505 to 1509 and spent that time putting down rebellions. Option C is wrong because Sadashiva Raya was a figurehead of the later Tuluva line in whose name Aliya Rama Raya ruled, and the disaster of Talikota in 1565 falls in his reign. Option D is wrong because Achyuta Deva Raya, who ruled from 1529 to 1542, was the weaker successor of Krishnadevaraya and saw the empire begin to slip.

The correct answer is B, at the expiration of every fifth year. Article 243-I, inserted by the seventy-third Constitutional Amendment of 1992, requires the Governor of a State to constitute a Finance Commission at the expiration of every fifth year to review the financial position of the Panchayats and to recommend how taxes, duties, tolls and fees should be divided between the State and its Panchayats. Article 243-Y makes the same body examine the finances of the Municipalities. Options A, C and D are wrong simply because the Constitution fixes the interval at five years, the same interval Article 280 sets for the central Finance Commission, which makes the two easy to remember together. Note also that the State Finance Commission, like the central one, is a constitutional body and not a statutory one.

The correct answer is D, Above the center of gravity. When a floating body tilts a little, the centre of buoyancy shifts to the centre of the newly displaced water, and the vertical drawn through it cuts the original axis of the body at a point called the metacentre. If that point lies above the centre of gravity, the weight and the upthrust form a couple that turns the body back to its old position, so the equilibrium is stable; the gap between the two points is the metacentric height, and a larger value gives a stiffer, quicker roll. Option A is the opposite case: with the metacentre below the centre of gravity the same couple tips the body further over, which is unstable equilibrium, and if the two coincide the body is in neutral equilibrium. Options B and C are wrong because the metacentre's position relative to the centre of buoyancy decides nothing; only its position relative to the centre of gravity does. Exam tip: M above G is stable, M below G capsizes.

The correct answer is D, Internet of Thing. The Internet of Things means giving everyday objects — machines, sensors, meters, shelves, vehicles — an address on the internet so that they can report what they sense and be controlled from a distance. Connecting a physical store's shelves, cameras and counters in this way gives the shopkeeper the same live data on stock and customer behaviour that an online seller reads from its website, which is exactly the facility the question describes. Option A, artificial intelligence, is the wider field of making machines reason, decide and recognise patterns; it may use the data these sensors send, but it is not the act of connecting them. Option C, machine learning, is a branch of that field in which a program improves from data instead of being programmed rule by rule. Option B, deep learning, is a further branch of machine learning built on multi-layer neural networks. Exam tip: IoT gathers the data, AI and machine learning make sense of it.

The correct answer is B, Proxy Firewall. A proxy firewall, also called an application gateway, stands between the client and the server as a stand-in for both, opens each message and filters it at the application layer, so it can read a URL, a command or an attachment before passing the request on. Because it must understand the protocol it guards, a separate proxy is written for each service, and HTTP, FTP and SMTP proxies are the common ones. Option A, the packet filter firewall, reads only the IP header and the port number at the network and transport layers and cannot see what a message contains. Option C, the stateful inspection firewall, goes a step further by tracking the state of every connection, but it still works at the transport layer. Option D, the next-generation firewall, is a product category that bundles several of these techniques rather than the classical firewall defined by application layer filtering. Exam tip: a packet filter reads headers, a proxy reads the message itself.

The correct answer is B, Drupal. Drupal is a content management system, a free program used to build and run websites; it keeps its pages in a database but is not itself a database management system. A DBMS is the software layer that creates, stores, queries and secures data, and the other three names are all DBMS products. Option A, Oracle, is the commercial relational database widely used by banks and large businesses. Option C, MySQL, is the open source relational database that a large share of the web runs on; Drupal and WordPress in fact store their content in a MySQL database, which shows the difference between the two kinds of software. Option D, MS Access, is the small desktop database that ships with Microsoft Office and keeps tables, queries, forms and reports in a single file. Exam tip: Oracle, MySQL, MS Access, SQL Server and PostgreSQL are database managers; Drupal, Joomla and WordPress are content management systems.

The correct answer is A, Rajasthan Renewable Energy Corporation Ltd. RRECL, with its office in Jaipur, is the state nodal agency of the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy for developing power from non-conventional sources in Rajasthan. It promotes solar, wind, biomass and small hydro projects and develops the state's solar parks. The strong, steady sunshine of the Thar region and the wind corridor around Jaisalmer make Rajasthan one of the country's main sources of renewable power. Option B, the Rajasthan State Electricity Board, was the old integrated utility and was unbundled in 2000 into separate generation, transmission and distribution companies, so it is not the nodal agency. Option C is not a real body. Option D, Jaipur Vidyut Vitaran Nigam Ltd., is one of the state's three discoms and only distributes power to consumers in its region. Exam tip: every state has one MNRE nodal agency for renewable energy — in Rajasthan it is RRECL.

The correct answer is C, Tropical Dry Deciduous Forest. Tropical dry deciduous forest covers the largest share of India's forest area. It grows in the wide belt that gets roughly 70 to 100 cm of rain a year — much of the peninsular plateau, central India, the eastern slopes of the Western Ghats and parts of the plains — and its trees, teak, sal, sandalwood, bamboo, khair and axlewood, shed their leaves in the dry months to save water. These forests are the most used for timber and were the most cleared for cultivation. Option A, tropical dry evergreen forest, is confined to a narrow strip along the Coromandel coast of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Option B, tropical semi evergreen forest, lies on the wetter margins of the Western Ghats, in the north east and in the Andamans. Option D, Himalayan moist temperate forest, is a mountain type between about 1,500 and 3,000 metres, with oak, deodar and pine. Exam tip: rainfall decides the type — above 200 cm evergreen, 100 to 200 cm moist deciduous, 70 to 100 cm dry deciduous.