State Exams Previous Year GK Questions with Answers

The correct answer is A, Tughlaq dynasty. The Khalji dynasty ended in 1320 when Khusrau Khan, who had seized the throne after Mubarak Shah Khalji, was defeated by Ghazi Malik, the governor of Dipalpur. Ghazi Malik took the title Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq and founded the Tughlaq dynasty, which ruled until 1414 and was the longest-lived of the five. Option B is wrong because no Rajput dynasty ruled Delhi after 1192; the Chahamana or Chauhan rule under Prithviraj III ended before the Sultanate began. Option C is wrong because the Sayyid dynasty came later, founded by Khizr Khan in 1414 after Timur's invasion had broken Tughlaq power. Option D is wrong because the Lodi dynasty, founded by Bahlul Khan Lodi in 1451, was the last of the five and followed the Sayyids, not the Khaljis.

The correct answer is A, Khilji. The Khalji or Khilji dynasty held the throne of Delhi only from 1290, when Jalaluddin Khalji seized power, to 1320, when Khusrau Khan was overthrown by Ghazi Malik. That is about thirty years, the shortest run of the five dynasties of the Delhi Sultanate, even though it produced its most powerful ruler in Alauddin Khalji. Option B is wrong because the Tughlaq dynasty ruled from 1320 to 1414, roughly ninety-four years, which is the longest of the five. Option C is wrong because the Sayyid dynasty, founded by Khizr Khan in 1414, lasted until 1451, about thirty-seven years, which is longer than the Khalji span. Option D is wrong because the Lodi dynasty ruled from 1451 to 1526, about seventy-five years, ending with Ibrahim Lodi's defeat at Panipat. For comparison, the Slave dynasty itself lasted about eighty-four years, from 1206 to 1290.

The correct answer is C, Constitutional body. The State Finance Commission owes its existence directly to the Constitution: Article 243-I, added by the seventy-third Amendment, requires the Governor to constitute it every fifth year for the Panchayats, and Article 243-Y extends the arrangement to the Municipalities. A body created by the Constitution itself is called a constitutional body, which is the highest of these categories. Option A is wrong because a merely legal or statutory body is one set up by an ordinary law of the legislature, such as the National Human Rights Commission. Option B is wrong because a non-statutory body rests only on an executive decision, as NITI Aayog and the former Planning Commission do. Option D is wrong because option C states the position correctly. A simple ladder helps here: a constitutional body is named in the Constitution, a statutory body is created by an ordinary Act, and a non-statutory body rests on an executive order alone; Article 243-I puts the State Finance Commission on the first rung.

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 A, Both I and II. Statement one is correct because the securities transaction tax is charged on the purchase and sale of securities on a recognised stock exchange and is borne by the investor who makes the transaction; the burden cannot be passed on to anybody else, which is the test of a direct tax, and it is administered by the Central Board of Direct Taxes. Statement two is correct because value added tax was levied by the states on the sale of goods at each stage of the chain, with credit for the tax paid on inputs, and the dealer recovered it from the buyer in the price, which is the test of an indirect tax; VAT has since been subsumed into GST for most goods.

Option B rejects the first statement, option D rejects the second, and option C rejects both, so all three miss one or other of these classifications. Remember the rule and not the list: if the payer can shift the burden, the tax is indirect.

The correct answer is B, Gift tax. A gift tax is charged on the transfer of money or property from one person to another without consideration; it is a tax on a transfer between persons, not on any sale of goods or supply of services. India abolished the gift tax in 1998, and gifts above the prescribed limit are now taxed in the hands of the receiver as income from other sources.

Option A, sales tax, was the tax states levied on the sale of goods before value added tax and then GST took its place. Option C, luxury tax, was levied by states on hotel accommodation and similar services and has been subsumed into GST. Option D, sin tax, is the general name for a heavy levy on goods considered harmful, such as tobacco and liquor, and in the GST era it appears as the compensation cess on demerit goods. All three of these are levied with reference to goods or services, so only the gift tax stands apart.

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, tungsten. Tungsten has the highest melting point of all metals, well above three thousand degrees Celsius, so a thin tungsten wire can be heated until it glows white without melting. It also has a fairly high resistivity and a low rate of evaporation at working temperature, which is why the filament lasts for hundreds of hours inside a bulb filled with an inert gas.

Option B, silver, is the best conductor of electricity of all metals, but for that very reason it would produce hardly any heat, and it melts at a temperature far too low for a filament. Option C, nichrome, is the right choice for the element of a heater or a toaster, where a red heat is wanted, but it cannot reach the white heat needed to give useful light. Option D, copper, is used for connecting wires precisely because it has a low resistance and stays cool while carrying current.

The correct answer is D, 2019. The National Clean Air Programme was launched by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change in January 2019 as a national framework to cut particulate pollution in cities that do not meet the national ambient air quality standards. It works city by city, through action plans prepared with the State Pollution Control Boards and monitored by the Central Pollution Control Board.

Option A, 2018, is the year the draft of the programme was put out for comments, which is why it is the most tempting wrong answer. Option B, 2017, predates the proposal altogether. Option C, 2020, is later than the launch and is sometimes confused with the creation of the Commission for Air Quality Management for the national capital region, which came afterwards. Remember 2019 for the programme, and remember that its legal backing comes from the Air Act of 1981 and the Environment (Protection) Act of 1986.

The correct answer is C, Guava. Guava is the classic jam fruit because it is rich in both pectin and acid, the two things a jam needs to set into a firm gel. Jam is made by boiling fruit pulp with sugar until the mixture reaches about 68 per cent soluble solids; without enough pectin it stays syrupy and never sets. Ripe guava carries close to one per cent pectin, so guava jam sets without any added gelling agent, and its strong aroma survives the boiling. Option A, banana, has very little pectin, and its pulp darkens and turns pasty on cooking, so it goes into chips, powder and puree. Option B, pineapple, is low in pectin and high in water, which is why it is preferred for squash, juice and slices in syrup. Option D, sweet orange, is low in acid and its segments break down, so oranges are used for squash and marmalade. Exam tip: jam needs pectin plus acid — guava, apple and aonla are the standard pectin-rich fruits.

The correct answer is B, D.C. only. In a permanent magnet moving coil instrument the coil is pivoted in the field of a permanent magnet, so the deflecting torque is proportional to the current itself and not to its square. If alternating current is passed, the torque reverses every half cycle; the pointer cannot follow fifty reversals a second and rests at zero, because the average value of a sine wave over a full cycle is zero. That is why such an ammeter or voltmeter reads direct current only, and why a rectifier is placed ahead of it when alternating current has to be measured. Its scale is uniform and it draws very little power, which makes it the moving coil galvanometer of the laboratory. Options A and D are wrong for the reason just given. Option C is wrong because an impulse lasts a few microseconds, far too short for the inertia of a pivoted coil and pointer. Exam tip: moving coil reads D.C., moving iron reads both A.C. and D.C.

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.

The correct answer is A, NSSO household consumption expenditure survey. Estimates of poverty and unemployment in India rest on the large sample surveys of the National Sample Survey Office, which since 2019 works as part of the National Statistical Office under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. Poverty is measured from the household consumer expenditure survey: the share of people whose monthly per capita spending falls below a poverty line drawn from a calorie and cost basket, the method of the Lakdawala, Tendulkar and Rangarajan committees. The same office also runs the employment and unemployment enquiry, now the annual Periodic Labour Force Survey. Option B is wrong because the Central Statistical Office compiled the national accounts and GDP, not these household surveys. Option C is wrong because the Planning Commission only fixed the poverty line and applied it to survey data. Option D is wrong because the survey measures consumption expenditure, not family income; India has no official income survey. Exam tip: the NSSO collects the data, the committees fix the poverty line.

The correct answer is A, 70 dB hearing loss in both ears. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 defines a deaf person in its schedule as one having 70 dB hearing loss in speech frequencies in both ears. A person with 60 to 70 dB loss in speech frequencies in both ears falls in the separate category of hard of hearing, so the two definitions must be read together. The Act replaced the Persons with Disabilities Act of 1995, widened the list of recognised disabilities from seven to twenty-one, and reserved four per cent of government posts for persons with benchmark disability. Options B and C set the bar higher than the schedule does; at 80 or 90 dB many deaf persons would fall outside the definition and lose the benefits the Act gives. Option D, 60 dB, is the lower end of the hard of hearing band, not deafness. Exam tip: 60 to 70 dB is hard of hearing, 70 dB and above is deaf.

The correct answer is C, Residuary powers in the Centre – Canadian Constitution. The makers of the Constitution took the scheme of a federation with a strong centre from Canada, and with it the rule that subjects not listed in any of the three lists stay with the Union; Article 248 and entry 97 of the Union List carry that rule. The appointment of state Governors by the centre and the advisory jurisdiction of the Supreme Court come from the same source. Option A is wrong because the Directive Principles were borrowed from the Irish constitution; Australia gave the Concurrent List, freedom of trade and commerce, and the joint sitting of the two Houses. Option B names the American constitution for the federal system, whereas from the United States came fundamental rights, judicial review, an independent judiciary and the impeachment procedure. Option D is wrong because fundamental duties were taken from the constitution of the erstwhile USSR. Exam tip: Canada for residuary powers, Ireland for Directive Principles, USSR for duties.