State Exams Previous Year GK Questions with Answers

The correct answer is B, Surface tension and viscosity both decrease. Heating a liquid makes its molecules move faster and sit a little further apart, so the attraction between them weakens, and both properties depend on that attraction. Surface tension arises because molecules at the surface are pulled inward by their neighbours, and that inward pull fades as temperature rises until it reaches zero at the critical temperature. Viscosity in a liquid comes from molecules gripping each other as layers slide past, so the same weakening makes the liquid thinner and easier to pour, which is why warm oil flows far more freely than cold oil. A is wrong because surface tension falls rather than rises on heating. C is wrong because neither of the two rises. D is wrong because viscosity of a liquid falls, not rises. Exam tip: liquids thin out on heating, but a gas becomes more viscous when heated.

The correct answer is D, 35‰. Every kilogram of sea water carries about 35 grams of dissolved salts, written as 35 parts per thousand, and roughly 27 of those grams are common salt, sodium chloride. Salinity is not the same everywhere. It falls where big rivers pour in fresh water or where heavy rain and melting ice dilute the sea, and it rises in hot, enclosed basins where evaporation is strong. That is why the Red Sea stands near 41 parts per thousand while the Baltic Sea is only about 7. A is wrong because 130 parts per thousand is far beyond any open ocean and belongs to a salt pan. B is wrong because 25 parts per thousand describes a brackish coastal patch near a river mouth, not the ocean as a whole. C is wrong because 225 parts per thousand is a laboratory strength brine. Exam tip: 35 average, Red Sea the saltiest sea, Baltic the least salty.

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, Meta Search Engine. A meta search engine keeps no index of its own. It hands the user's query to several other search engines at the same time, collects what they send back, removes repeated hits and shows one merged list. Because it borrows from many sources, a single search covers more of the web than any one engine would on its own. Dogpile and Startpage work in this way. A is wrong because advanced search only means the extra filters an ordinary engine offers, such as date, file type or exact phrase, while it still searches its own index. C is wrong because search tool is a loose term for any utility that finds files or text, not a defined class of engine. D is wrong because Boolean searching refers to using AND, OR and NOT inside one engine, not to querying other engines. Exam tip: meta means about, so a meta search engine searches the searchers.

The correct answer is A, HREF. The href attribute of the anchor tag carries the address the browser should open when the link is clicked, so href alone decides where a link leads. The text written between the opening and closing anchor tags is what the reader sees and clicks. The value of href can be a full web address, a path to another file on the same site, or a point inside the same page written after a hash. B is wrong because src supplies the source file for images, scripts and iframes, not for links. C is wrong because link is a separate element placed in the head section to attach stylesheets; it is not an attribute of the anchor tag. D is wrong because HYPERLINK is not an HTML attribute at all, it is the name of a spreadsheet function. Exam tip: remember the pair — href points a link somewhere, src pulls a file in.

The correct answer is B, plant breeding. Plant breeding is the deliberate improvement of crops by choosing parents with desirable characters, crossing them, selecting among the progeny and multiplying the best lines; the high yielding wheat and rice varieties of the Green Revolution came from it, and modern breeding is often combined with tissue culture and marker assisted selection. Option A is wrong because plant embryology studies the development of the embryo and seed, which is descriptive rather than an improvement programme. Option C is wrong because plant biochemistry studies the chemical reactions inside the plant, such as photosynthesis and secondary metabolites. Option D is wrong because plant anatomy studies internal structure and tissues under the microscope. Breeding works with genes already present in related plants, while genetic engineering can bring a gene from any organism.

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 D, Vitamin D - Paul Muller, because this is the pair that does not match. Paul Hermann Muller is remembered for showing that DDT kills insects, work for which he received a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; vitamin D is associated with Edward Mellanby, who linked its absence to rickets, and with Adolf Windaus, who worked out its chemistry. Option A is correctly matched because Elmer McCollum identified the fat soluble factor that came to be called vitamin A. Option B is correctly matched because McCollum also identified the water soluble factor named vitamin B. Option C is correctly matched because Albert Szent-Gyorgyi isolated the substance later named vitamin C and won a Nobel Prize for that work. Read the word NOT in the stem carefully, since three of the four pairs here are deliberately correct.

The correct answer is C, Edward Jenner. In 1796 Jenner showed that material from a cowpox sore protected a boy against smallpox, the first deliberate vaccination, and the word vaccine itself comes from vacca, the Latin for cow. That experiment founded the science of immunology. Option A is wrong because Robert Koch identified the bacteria that cause tuberculosis and cholera and gave the rules for linking a microbe to a disease, so he belongs to bacteriology. Option B is wrong because Louis Pasteur gave the germ theory of disease, pasteurisation and the rabies vaccine, and is called the father of microbiology, although his vaccine work came after Jenner. Option D is wrong because Karl Landsteiner discovered the human blood groups. The trap in this question is Pasteur, whose fame in vaccines makes candidates skip the earlier name.

The correct answer is C, a mixture of water and steam. In a boiling water reactor, the design used at Tarapur, ordinary water is allowed to boil inside the reactor vessel itself, so the coolant leaving the core is a mixture of water and steam; the steam is separated at the top and driven straight to the turbine, without the separate steam generator that other designs need. Option A is wrong because carbon dioxide cools gas cooled reactors, not water reactors. Option B is wrong because pressurised water is the coolant of the pressurised water reactor, where the pressure is kept high precisely so that the water does not boil, which is the difference between the two designs. Option D is wrong because liquid metal, usually sodium, cools a fast breeder reactor. The single fact to carry into the hall is that boiling water reactors boil the water in the core and pressurised reactors do not.

The correct answer is A, Tarapur. The Tarapur Atomic Power Station in Maharashtra was commissioned in 1969 with American assistance and was the first nuclear power station in India as well as in Asia; its first two units are boiling water reactors, a design used nowhere else in the country. Option B is wrong because Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu is the newest of the large stations and uses Russian pressurised water reactors of the VVER type. Option C is wrong because Kaiga in Karnataka came much later and uses indigenous pressurised heavy water reactors. Option D is wrong because Rawatbhata in Rajasthan, built with Canadian collaboration, was the second station and is important for a different reason, being the first to use the pressurised heavy water reactor that India later built on its own. Remember Tarapur for the first station and Rawatbhata for the first heavy water reactor.

The correct answer is A, 14. When the Constitution came into force in 1950 the Eighth Schedule listed 14 languages. Option B is wrong because 18 was the count reached only in 1992, after the 71st Amendment added Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali to the 15 that existed then. Option C is wrong because 16 was never a stage in the list at all; the count went from 14 to 15 in 1967 when the 21st Amendment added Sindhi, and then straight to 18. Option D is wrong because 22 is the present number, reached in 2003 when the 92nd Amendment added Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali. Candidates lose this question by reading the word initially carelessly and answering with the current figure, so read the stem twice: 14 at the start, 22 today.

The correct answer is A, Urdu. Under Article 345 a State may adopt any language in use within it as its official language, and Uttar Pradesh has adopted Hindi as its official language and Urdu as its second official language. Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language written in the Perso-Arabic script and is in the Eighth Schedule. Option B is wrong because Awadhi, the speech of the Awadh region and the language of Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas, is counted as a dialect of Hindi in the census returns and has no official status. Option C is wrong because Bundeli, spoken in the Bundelkhand region, is likewise treated as a Hindi dialect. Option D is wrong because Bagheli, spoken in the Baghelkhand tract on the Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh border, is also a dialect and not an official language. The examiner is testing the difference between an official language and a regional dialect.

The correct answer is A, Kannada. Kannada is one of the four major Dravidian languages, the others being Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam, and it is the official language of Karnataka. Option B is wrong because Hindi belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family and descends through Prakrit and Apabhramsha from Sanskrit. Option C is wrong because Oriya, now written as Odia, is also an Indo-Aryan language and is the official language of Odisha. Option D is wrong because Manipuri, also called Meitei, belongs to the Tibeto-Burman branch of the Sino-Tibetan family and is written in the Meitei Mayek script as well as in the Bengali-Assamese script. A useful rule for the exam is that the four southern State languages, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, are Dravidian, while almost every northern and eastern State language is Indo-Aryan.

The correct answer is B, African-Asian. There is no language family by that name in India. The Afro-Asiatic family, which the name echoes, covers Arabic, Hebrew and the Berber and Cushitic languages of West Asia and North Africa, and no Indian language belongs to it. Option A is wrong because the Tibeto-Burman family, a branch of the Sino-Tibetan family, is very much present in India and covers Manipuri, Bodo, Lepcha, Ladakhi and the Naga languages of the north-east. Option C is wrong because the Dravidian family is the second largest family in the country and covers Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tulu and Gondi. Option D is wrong because the Austro-Asiatic or Munda family is spoken in Jharkhand, Odisha and Meghalaya and covers Santali, Mundari, Ho and Khasi. The families actually found in India are Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman, and the small Andamanese and Tai-Kadai groups.

The correct answer is A, football. An offside trap is a defensive tactic in which the defenders move up the field together at the right moment so that an attacking player is left beyond the last defender when the ball is played forward, and the referee then gives offside. The tactic exists only because football has an offside law. Option B is wrong because badminton has no offside rule; its terms are smash, drop shot, lob and deuce. Option C is wrong because tennis is played across a net with the players in separate courts, so there is no line to be caught behind; its terms are love, deuce, ace and let. Option D is wrong because table tennis is also a net game with its own terms such as chop, loop and let. Hockey has an offside rule in its older form, but the trap as a named tactic is asked for football.

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.

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.