State Exams 2021 Previous Year GK Questions with Answers

The correct answer is B, Datasheet. In a database such as Microsoft Access, the view that shows a table as rows and columns, looking like a spreadsheet grid, is called Datasheet view. Each row of that grid is one record and each column is one field, and the names along the top come from the field names set in Design view. Datasheet view lets you type data straight in, sort it, filter it and widen columns, while Design view is where the data type, field size and primary key are fixed. Queries and forms can also be opened in Datasheet view, so the name belongs to the display format, not to one object. Option A is wrong because a record is a single row of the grid, one complete entry, not the grid itself. Option C is wrong because a query is a saved question that pulls out selected rows; it is a database object. Option D is wrong because 'Tables' names the objects being displayed, while the question asks what the grid-like view is called. Exam tip: Access tables have two main views — Datasheet for data, Design for structure.

The correct answer is A, Rousseau. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract (1762) that the English people are free only during the election of members of Parliament, and are slaves once the election is over. He used the line to attack representative government. For Rousseau sovereignty rested in the general will of the people and could not be handed over to deputies, so only direct democracy counted as real self-rule. The remark is quoted in polity papers as the classic criticism of indirect democracy. Option B is wrong because John Locke defended representative government and the natural rights to life, liberty and property, and his Two Treatises justified the settlement of 1688 in England. Option C is wrong because Plato, in The Republic, wanted rule by philosopher-kings and distrusted democracy altogether. Option D is wrong because Aristotle, in Politics, classified constitutions and called man a political animal, but this saying is not his. Exam tip: Rousseau — The Social Contract, general will, 'man is born free but everywhere he is in chains'.

The correct answer is A, World Bank. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) is the oldest arm of the World Bank Group and the body people mean when they say 'World Bank'. It was agreed at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 along with the IMF and began work in 1946, first to rebuild Europe after the Second World War and later to lend for development. Its headquarters are in Washington, D.C., and IBRD lends to middle-income and creditworthy low-income governments. The World Bank Group also holds the IDA, which gives the poorest countries interest-free credits, plus IFC, MIGA and ICSID. Option B is wrong because the IMF is the other Bretton Woods twin and looks after exchange stability and balance-of-payments support, not project lending. Option C is wrong because the WTO replaced GATT in 1995 and frames trade rules, with its seat at Geneva. Option D is wrong because option A is correct. Exam tip: World Bank = IBRD + IDA; the wider World Bank Group adds IFC, MIGA and ICSID.

The correct answer is A, (321)8. To turn a binary number into octal, group the bits in threes starting from the rightmost bit, adding leading zeros to complete the last group, because three bits cover the eight octal digits. The number 11010001 splits into 11, 010 and 001, and the first group is written as 011. The group 011 has the value 3, the group 010 has the value 2 and the group 001 has the value 1, so the octal number is 321. Checking in decimal confirms it: 11010001 is 128 + 64 + 16 + 1, which equals 209, and octal 321 is 3 times 64 plus 2 times 8 plus 1, again 209. Option B is wrong because 123 is the same digits reversed. Option C is wrong because 641 would need the bits 110100001. Option D is wrong because 146 in octal equals 102 in decimal.

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 A, Javelin throw. Neeraj Chopra won the men's javelin throw at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, which were held in 2021, and that medal was India's first Olympic gold in athletics and its first individual gold since shooting in 2008. He went on to take the world title at Budapest in 2023.

Option B, badminton, is wrong because India's badminton medals at the Games have been a silver and bronzes, not a gold, and none of them belongs to Chopra. Option C, tennis, is wrong because India has won only a bronze in tennis at the Olympics, in 1996, and Chopra is not a tennis player. Option D, weight lifting, is wrong because Mirabai Chanu won a silver in weightlifting at the same Tokyo Games, which is why the option looks tempting to a candidate who remembers only the Games and not the event. Chopra is a thrower, and his event is the javelin.

The correct answer is B, Trash. When a letter is deleted from a mailbox it is not wiped out at once. It is moved to a folder called Trash, or Bin in some services, and kept there for a fixed number of days so that a letter deleted by mistake can be restored. Only when the folder is emptied, or the holding period ends, is the letter removed for good.

Option A, Drafts, holds letters that have been written but not yet sent, so a deleted letter never lands there. Option C, Inbox, is the folder where arriving mail is kept, and deleting a letter is precisely the act of taking it out of the Inbox. Option D, Sent mail, keeps copies of the letters you have already despatched, which is a record of outgoing post and not of deleted post. Trash is therefore the only correct choice.

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 B, 2004. The committee on civil services reforms under P. C. Hota, a former Chairman of the Union Public Service Commission, was set up in 2004 and gave its report the same year. It looked at how officers are recruited, trained, posted and promoted, and suggested a fixed minimum tenure in a post, a sounder system of performance appraisal, mid-career training with examinations, and lateral entry of specialists for jobs needing domain knowledge. Many of its ideas later fed into the work of the Second Administrative Reforms Commission set up in 2005 under Veerappa Moily. Option A is wrong because 2003 saw no such committee. Option C is wrong because 2005 is the year of the Second Administrative Reforms Commission and of the Right to Information Act. Option D is wrong because by 2006 the Hota report was already being examined. Exam tip: Hota Committee 2004 on civil services reform; Second ARC 2005 under Veerappa Moily.

The correct answer is D, Virtualization. Virtualization creates a software layer over the physical processor, memory and storage of a machine, so that one server can be divided into several virtual machines, each running its own operating system as though it had hardware of its own. The program that makes this possible is the hypervisor. Because a single strong server then does the work of many lightly used ones, organisations buy less hardware and spend less on power, cooling and floor space, which is why it is called the most effective way to cut IT costs. It is also the base on which cloud computing is built. Option A is wrong because artificial intelligence is about machines doing tasks that need human-like reasoning. Option B is wrong because clustering joins several computers to work as one for speed and reliability, not to abstract resources. Option C is wrong because a storage area network is a dedicated network for storage alone. Exam tip: hypervisor runs virtual machines, and virtualization underlies cloud computing.

The correct answer is D, Output devices. A computer works on binary digital signals, and an output device turns the processed result into a form a person can see, hear or hold: a monitor shows it as a picture, a printer puts it on paper, a speaker turns it into sound and a plotter draws it. That is why the monitor and printer are the two output devices named in every syllabus. Option A is wrong because storage devices such as a hard disk, SSD or pen drive only hold data for later use; they do not present it to the user. Option B is wrong because a keyboard is an input device, and it does the opposite job, turning key presses into signals for the machine. Option C is wrong for the same reason: input devices such as the mouse, scanner and microphone feed data in. Exam tip: monitor and printer are output, keyboard and mouse are input, a touch screen is both.

The correct answer is B, Vinoba Bhave. Acharya Vinoba Bhave won the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1958, in the category of community leadership, and was the first Indian to receive it. The award was created in 1957 in memory of Ramon Magsaysay, the President of the Philippines who died in an air crash that year, and it is often called Asia’s Nobel Prize. Vinoba Bhave was honoured for the Bhoodan movement he began at Pochampally in 1951, walking from village to village to persuade landowners to give land to the landless. Option A is wrong because the cartoonist R. K. Laxman received the award much later, in 1984. Option C is wrong because Jawaharlal Nehru never received it. Option D is wrong because Mahatma Gandhi died in 1948, nine years before the award was instituted. Exam tip: Magsaysay Award began 1957, first Indian Vinoba Bhave 1958, Mother Teresa 1962.

The correct answer is B, because the Rabatak inscription was not found in western Uttar Pradesh. It came to light in 1993 at Rabatak in Baghlan province of northern Afghanistan, and it is written in the Bactrian language using the Greek script. Its importance is that it lists Kanishka's ancestors, Kujula Kadphises, Vima Taktu and Vima Kadphises, and so settled the order of the early Kushan rulers. Statement A is true, since under Kanishka the empire ran from Central Asia through the north-west to the Ganga valley and southward to Malwa, with Purushapura, today's Peshawar, as its capital. Statement C is true, as Kanishka's court supported Ashvaghosha, who wrote the Buddhacharita, and Vasumitra, who presided over the fourth Buddhist council held in Kashmir. Statement D is true, because his coins carry Greek, Iranian and Indian deities side by side, among them the Buddha, Oesho or Shiva, Mithra and Nana. Exam tip: Rabatak means Afghanistan and the Kushan family tree.

The correct answer is C, Sardar Hukam Singh. The Parliamentary Committee headed by Sardar Hukam Singh, then Speaker of the Lok Sabha, examined the demand for a Punjabi-speaking state and recommended the division of Punjab. The Punjab Reorganisation Act, 1966 followed, and on 1 November 1966 Haryana became a separate state while the hill districts went to Himachal Pradesh and Chandigarh was made a Union Territory serving as the shared capital.

Option A, Lal Bahadur Shastri, was Prime Minister until January 1966 and did not head such a committee. Option B, Indira Gandhi, was Prime Minister when the Act was passed but again headed no committee on the question. Option D, Sir Chhotu Ram, was a peasant leader of the region who died in 1945, long before the reorganisation. A related name worth keeping is the Shah Commission, which drew the actual boundaries after the committee reported.