State Exams 2021 Previous Year GK Questions with Answers

The correct answer is D, 1929. The Great Depression began with the crash of the New York stock market in October 1929, remembered through Black Thursday and Black Tuesday of that month. Banks failed, industrial output collapsed and unemployment rose across the United States and Europe through the early 1930s; the recovery in America came with Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal from 1933. A is wrong because 1911 is associated with the Chinese Revolution, not with any economic collapse. B is wrong because 1931 falls in the depth of the Depression but is two years after it began, and this is the option that catches candidates who remember only that the worst years were in the early thirties. C is wrong because 1914 is the year the First World War started.

The correct answer is B, 1799. Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in November 1799 in the coup that overthrew the Directory, and he became First Consul of France, which is the point at which the French Revolution is usually said to have ended; he crowned himself emperor five years later, in 1804. A is wrong because 1797 is the year of the Treaty of Campo Formio, which ended his first Italian campaign but gave him no political office in Paris. C is wrong because by 1800 he was already in power and fought the battle of Marengo as First Consul. D is wrong because in 1798 he was away in Egypt, where his fleet was destroyed by Nelson at the Battle of the Nile, and he returned from that campaign only in 1799. The chain worth keeping is 1789 revolution, 1799 Napoleon in power, 1804 emperor, 1815 Waterloo.

The correct answer is B, Nibble. A byte is made up of eight bits, so half a byte is four bits, and four bits together are called a nibble. The term matters in hexadecimal arithmetic, because one hexadecimal digit represents exactly one nibble, which is why four binary digits convert neatly into a single hexadecimal character. A is wrong because a byte is the full group of eight bits, not half of itself, and it is the unit in which file sizes and memory are measured. C is wrong because a bit, short for binary digit, is the smallest unit of data and holds only a 0 or a 1, so it is one-eighth of a byte rather than one-half. D is wrong because word size is the number of bits a particular processor handles in one operation, which may be 8, 16, 32 or 64 bits depending on the machine, and is not a fixed fraction of a byte.

The correct answer is B, second. The generations of computers are named for the switching device they use, and the second generation, running from the late 1950s into the early 1960s, replaced the bulky vacuum tube with the transistor, which had been invented at Bell Laboratories in 1947. Transistor machines were smaller, cooler, cheaper and far more reliable, and IBM 1401 and IBM 7094 are the usual examples. Option D is wrong because the first generation used vacuum tubes or valves, as in ENIAC and UNIVAC-I. Option C is wrong because the third generation moved on to integrated circuits, many transistors on a single chip, as in the IBM 360. Option A is wrong because the fourth generation is defined by the microprocessor and very large scale integration, which began with the Intel 4004 in 1971.

The correct answer is C, 8 August 1942. The All India Congress Committee, meeting at Gowalia Tank in Bombay, passed the Quit India resolution on 8 August 1942, and Gandhi gave his Do or Die speech the same evening. The government arrested the entire leadership in the early hours of 9 August, so the movement spread as a leaderless rising. Option A is wrong because the session opened on 7 August but the resolution was adopted on the following day. Option B is wrong because 15 August is remembered for independence in 1947 and has no connection with the start of the movement. Option D is wrong because by 11 August the movement was already at its height, with strikes, attacks on police stations and railway lines in the United Provinces, Bihar and Bombay. A useful memory hook is the name August Kranti given to the movement and to the maidan where it began.

The correct answer is C, Annie Besant. The Irish-born theosophist, who had made India her home and led the Theosophical Society from Adyar, presided over the Calcutta session of the Congress in 1917, the year in which the Government interned her for her Home Rule agitation. She had founded the Home Rule League in 1916 and edited the papers New India and Commonweal. Option A is wrong because Kasturba Gandhi took part in satyagraha but never held office in the Congress. Option B is wrong because Sarojini Naidu, who presided at the Kanpur session of 1925, was the first Indian woman president, which is the distinction examiners test against this question; Besant was the first woman of any nationality. Option D is wrong because Aruna Asaf Ali belongs to a later generation, famous for hoisting the flag at the Gowalia Tank maidan during the Quit India movement of 1942 and for working underground.

The correct answer is A, 1896. Vande Mataram, written in Sanskritised Bengali by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and included in his novel Anandamath, was sung for the first time at a Congress session at the Calcutta session of 1896, and Rabindranath Tagore himself set the tune and sang it. The song went on to become the anthem of the Swadeshi movement after the partition of Bengal in 1905, and the Constituent Assembly gave it the status of the national song on 24 January 1950, the same day it adopted Jana Gana Mana as the national anthem. Options B, C and D are wrong because they shift the year by one, two or three; the sessions of 1897 at Amraoti, 1898 at Madras and 1899 at Lucknow have no connection with the first singing. Fix 1896 Calcutta for the song and 1905 for the movement that made it famous.

The correct answer is C, the President, after an enquiry conducted by the Supreme Court. Article 317(1) provides that the chairman or any other member of a Public Service Commission, whether of the Union or of a state, shall be removed from office only by order of the President on the ground of misbehaviour, and only after the Supreme Court has held an inquiry on a reference made by the President and reported that he ought to be removed. Options A, B and D all put the power in the Governor's hands, which is the standard trap: the Governor appoints a member of a State Commission and may suspend him while the inquiry is pending, but he cannot remove him. There is no impeachment by the Vidhan Sabha for this office, so A is doubly wrong, and D wrongly substitutes the High Court for the Supreme Court.

The correct answer is D, the Uttar Pradesh State Legislature. Article 321 allows additional functions to be conferred on a Public Service Commission, and it names two different authorities for the two kinds of Commission: Parliament may extend the functions of the Union Public Service Commission, while the legislature of a state may extend the functions of that state's Public Service Commission. The functions of the Uttar Pradesh Public Service Commission are therefore extended by an Act of the Uttar Pradesh legislature. Option A is wrong because the Prime Minister has no such power under the Constitution. Option B is wrong because a Union ministry cannot legislate for a state Commission. Option C is wrong because the President appoints, removes and frames conditions of service, but extending functions is a legislative act under Article 321.

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, P. V. Narasimha Rao. He became Prime Minister in June 1991, in the middle of the balance of payments crisis, and his government devalued the rupee, borrowed from the International Monetary Fund and announced the New Economic Policy of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation, with the Statement on Industrial Policy issued on 24 July 1991. Option C is the trap that catches most candidates: Manmohan Singh was the Finance Minister who presented the reform budget of 1991 and is rightly linked with the reforms, but he became Prime Minister only in 2004. Option B is wrong because Atal Bihari Vajpayee headed governments later, in 1996 and from 1998, when the second generation of reforms and much of the disinvestment took place. Option D is wrong because option A names the right person.

The correct answer is C, Micro Enterprise. Under the composite criteria notified in 2020, an enterprise with investment in plant, machinery or equipment up to one crore rupees and turnover up to five crore rupees is a micro enterprise, and the same ceilings apply whether it manufactures goods or renders services. An enterprise crossing either ceiling moves up a category.

Option A is wrong because tiny enterprise was a category of the older policy framework and is not used in the present classification. Option B is wrong because a small enterprise stood at investment up to ten crore rupees and turnover up to fifty crore under the same notification. Option D is wrong because a medium enterprise stood at fifty crore and two hundred and fifty crore rupees. The ceilings have since been revised upward, but an enterprise of this size remains in the micro category, so the answer does not change.

The correct answer is C, Ethyl alcohol. Ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, dissolves resins, gums, dyes and oils and also evaporates quickly, so paints, varnishes and polishes made with it dry fast; this makes it the common solvent of the paint industry. Its formula is C2H5OH, and it is got by the fermentation of molasses or grain and, these days, from sugarcane for blending with petrol. The same property of being a good solvent makes ethanol the base of tincture of iodine, cough syrups and many tonics. Alcohol meant for industry is mixed with poisonous substances such as methanol and then coloured, giving denatured spirit, so that it is not drunk. A is wrong because methyl alcohol is highly poisonous and even a small quantity can cause blindness or death, so its use is restricted. B is wrong because n-propyl alcohol is costly and little used on this scale. D is wrong because iso-propyl alcohol serves mainly as a rubbing alcohol and a cleaning agent. Exam tip: ethanol is C2H5OH, and denatured spirit is ethanol made undrinkable with methanol.

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 B, Madras. The East India Company set up the first municipal corporation in India at Madras in 1688, with a mayor and aldermen, mainly to raise local taxes for the maintenance of the town. It is the oldest municipal body in the country and is the standard answer to questions on the beginnings of urban local government in India.

Option A is wrong because Calcutta received its municipal corporation in 1726, nearly four decades later, under a Royal Charter. Option C is wrong for the same reason: Bombay also got its corporation in 1726 along with Calcutta, so neither was the first. Option D is wrong because Delhi was not a Presidency town of the Company in the seventeenth century and its municipal corporation was created much later, in 1958, by an Act of Parliament. Only Madras fits the year 1688.

The correct answer is D, Sheet erosion. Sheet erosion peels a thin, even film of topsoil off a whole slope, leaving no channel or scar behind, so a farmer may not notice it for years while fertility quietly drains away. It begins with raindrops splashing the bare surface loose, after which a shallow sheet of run-off carries the finest and most fertile particles off the field. The only hints are a paler soil colour, exposed pebbles and roots standing above the ground. A is wrong because gully erosion cuts deep, wide channels that nobody can miss and that often put land out of cultivation. B is wrong because stream bank erosion eats sideways into a river bank and shows up as caving earth. C is wrong because rill erosion carves small finger-like grooves that are shallow but still plainly visible. Exam tip: order them by how easily they are seen — sheet, then rill, then gully.

The correct answer is B, Masulipatnam. Masulipatnam, the port town of coastal Andhra Pradesh, was the great centre of the painted and block printed cotton that European traders bought as chintz, and the same town is still one of the two homes of kalamkari. Option A is wrong because Burhanpur in Madhya Pradesh was known for its fine muslin and zari weaving, not for chintz. Option C is wrong because Calicut on the Malabar coast gave its name to calico, a plain woven cotton, which is the cloth most often confused with chintz in examinations. Option D is wrong because Dhaka was famous for muslin of the finest count, the cloth called malmal and abrawan. Keep the three names separate: chintz from Masulipatnam, calico from Calicut and muslin from Dhaka.

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, Surinsar-Mansar Lakes. These twin lakes lie near Jammu in the Jammu and Kashmir region, not in Uttar Pradesh, so they are the odd one out in this list. Option A is wrong because Sur Sarovar, also called Keetham Lake, lies close to Agra in Uttar Pradesh and is named after the poet Surdas. Option B is wrong because the Samaspur Bird Sanctuary is in the Rae Bareli district of Uttar Pradesh and is a winter haven for migratory waterfowl. Option C is wrong because Sarsai Nawar Jheel lies in the Etawah district of Uttar Pradesh and is known for the sarus crane, the state bird. The trap in such questions is that the names sound alike; fix the state of each site by the district it belongs to, and remember that Uttar Pradesh holds a large cluster of Ramsar wetlands along the Ganga plain.