State Exams 2023 Previous Year GK Questions with Answers

The correct answer is D, None of the above. None of the three substances listed slows a reaction down; the substance that does that is called a negative catalyst or an inhibitor. A catalyst changes the rate of a reaction without being used up in it, and it works by lowering the activation energy the reactants must cross. A positive catalyst speeds the reaction up, while a negative catalyst holds it back, the way glycerol slows the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide. A is wrong because a catalytic promoter is added to make the catalyst more active, so it raises the rate instead of lowering it. B is wrong because a homogeneous catalyst is one present in the same phase as the reactants, and it speeds the reaction up. C is wrong because a heterogeneous catalyst sits in a different phase, like iron in the Haber process, and it also speeds the reaction up. Exam tip: remember the pair - a promoter increases a catalyst's activity, a poison or inhibitor decreases it.

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, botnet attack. A botnet is built by infecting many connected devices, each of which becomes a zombie obeying a single controller; the network so assembled is then rented out or used for spam, fraud or a flood of traffic. The wording of the question, many interconnected devices turned into one attack network, describes the building of the botnet itself. Option A is wrong for a reason worth understanding: a distributed denial of service attack is usually launched from a botnet, but it names the flooding of one victim, not the assembling of the device network. Option C is wrong because a zero-day attack exploits a flaw the vendor does not yet know of and has nothing to do with numbers of devices. Option D is wrong because spear phishing is a targeted fraudulent message sent to one chosen person.

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, Kesavananda Bharati vs. State of Kerala. In this case of 1973 a bench of thirteen judges, the largest the Supreme Court has ever assembled, held by seven votes to six that Parliament may amend any part of the Constitution but may not damage or destroy its basic structure. Features such as the supremacy of the Constitution, the republican and democratic form of government, secularism, the separation of powers, judicial review and free and fair elections have since been treated as part of that basic structure. Option A is wrong because Golaknath (1967) took a different line altogether, holding that Parliament could not amend fundamental rights at all, and that ruling was itself overturned in Kesavananda. Option C is wrong because Minerva Mills (1980) only applied the doctrine that already existed and used it to strike down parts of the 42nd Amendment. Option D is wrong because a single case laid the doctrine down. Exam tip: Golaknath 1967, Kesavananda 1973, Minerva Mills 1980.

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 A, the north-east monsoon. As the monsoon retreats in October and November the wind direction reverses and air moves from the land towards the sea. Crossing the Bay of Bengal it picks up moisture and strikes the Coromandel coast, giving Tamil Nadu and coastal Andhra Pradesh their main rainy season. This is why Tamil Nadu is the one large part of India whose farming calendar depends on winter rather than summer rain.

Option B, local air circulation, produces land and sea breezes that are too small to give a season of rain. Option C, temperate cyclones, are the western disturbances, and they bring winter rain to the north-west of India, not to the far south. Option D, the south-west monsoon, leaves Tamil Nadu dry because the state lies in the rain shadow of the Western Ghats during those months.

The correct answer is A, The Calcutta High Court. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands come under the Calcutta High Court, which has a permanent circuit bench at Port Blair. The Constitution allows Parliament to extend a high court’s jurisdiction to a union territory, so several union territories are attached to the high court of a neighbouring state rather than having one of their own. Calcutta, set up in 1862, is the oldest high court in India, along with Bombay and Madras of the same year. Option B is wrong because the Delhi High Court covers only the National Capital Territory of Delhi. Option C is wrong because the Madras High Court covers Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, though the islands lie nearer to it. Option D is wrong because the Andhra Pradesh High Court, created in 2019 when the Telangana High Court was separated, covers only that state. Exam tip: Andaman and Nicobar under Calcutta, Lakshadweep under Kerala, Puducherry under Madras.

The correct answer is B, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. This law makes the right to work a legal guarantee: every rural household whose adult members are willing to do unskilled manual work is entitled to at least 100 days of wage employment in a financial year. The Act was passed in 2005 as NREGA, came into force from 2 February 2006 in 200 districts, was extended to the whole country by 2008 and renamed after Mahatma Gandhi in 2009. If work is not given within fifteen days, the worker is paid an unemployment allowance, and one third of the days are reserved for women. Option A is wrong because the IIM Act of 2017 only gives those management institutes the power to grant degrees. Option C is wrong because the Payment of Wages amendment merely allowed wages by cheque or bank transfer. Option D is wrong because the Citizenship Act deals with who is a citizen. Exam tip: NREGA 2005, in force 2 February 2006, 100 days of work.

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 C, Jim Corbett National Park. It is India's first national park, set up in 1936 as Hailey National Park, in the Nainital area of present-day Uttarakhand. It was later called Ramganga National Park and was renamed in the 1950s in honour of Jim Corbett, the famous hunter who turned into a naturalist and wrote 'Man-Eaters of Kumaon'. Project Tiger was launched here in 1973, and the park lies along the Ramganga river in the foothills of the Himalayas. Option A is wrong because Gir in Gujarat, the last home of the Asiatic lion, became a national park only in 1975. Option B is wrong because Kaziranga in Assam, famous for the one-horned rhinoceros, became a national park in 1974. Option D is wrong because Rajaji National Park in Uttarakhand was formed in 1983 by joining three sanctuaries. Exam tip: the first national park went from Hailey (1936) to Ramganga to Jim Corbett, and Project Tiger began here in 1973.

The correct answer is B, H3O+. A hydrogen ion (H+) is just a bare proton, so it cannot stay alone in water. It at once attaches itself to a water molecule and forms the hydronium ion, H3O+. So when an acid such as hydrochloric acid dissolves in water, it really produces H3O+ ions, and these give the solution its acidic nature. Without water, acids do not show acidic behaviour, which is why dry HCl gas does not change the colour of dry blue litmus paper. Option A is wrong because HO- (OH-) is the hydroxide ion, which bases give in water. Option C is wrong because H2 is hydrogen gas, a neutral molecule, not an ion. Option D is wrong because H2SO4 is sulphuric acid itself, a compound that releases hydrogen ions in water. Exam tip: acids give H3O+ ions in water and bases give OH- ions; a solution with pH 7 is neutral, below 7 acidic and above 7 basic.

The correct answer is C, GDP at market price + Net factor income from abroad. GDP counts everything produced within the country's borders, whoever produces it. GNP counts what is produced by the country's own normal residents, wherever they work. So to move from GDP to GNP, we add the income our residents earn abroad and subtract what foreigners earn in India; this net figure is called net factor income from abroad (NFIA). If NFIA is negative, GNP is smaller than GDP. Option A is wrong because GDP at market price minus depreciation gives NDP at market price, not GNP. Option B is wrong because it uses GNP to define itself, and adding subsidies is a step used to move from market price to factor cost, not to find GNP. Option D is wrong because NDP at factor cost plus NFIA gives NNP at factor cost, which is the national income. Exam tip: domestic to national, add NFIA; gross to net, subtract depreciation; market price to factor cost, subtract indirect taxes and add subsidies.

The correct answer is B, SBI. The State Bank of India was not part of the 1969 nationalisation because it was already a government-owned bank. It was created on 1 July 1955, when the Imperial Bank of India was taken over under the State Bank of India Act, following the advice of the All India Rural Credit Survey Committee. On 19 July 1969, the government of Indira Gandhi nationalised 14 major commercial banks, each with deposits of over ₹50 crore. Six more banks were nationalised in 1980. Option A is wrong because Canara Bank was one of the 14 banks nationalised in 1969. Option C is wrong because UCO Bank, then called United Commercial Bank, was also on the 1969 list. Option D is wrong because Bank of Baroda was likewise nationalised in 1969. Exam tip: Imperial Bank became SBI in 1955; 14 banks were nationalised in 1969 and 6 in 1980; the RBI itself was nationalised in 1949.