Rajasthan 2018 Previous Year GK Questions with Answers

The correct answer is B, Web Resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is the address of a web resource: it says where the resource sits on the network and, through the scheme written in front, how it is to be fetched. Thus it carries the protocol, the host name, the port if one is needed, and the path of the file, and schemes such as http, https, ftp and mailto each bring their own way of retrieving. The idea was given by Tim Berners-Lee along with HTML and HTTP, and a URL is one kind of Uniform Resource Identifier. A is wrong because it is too loose; a URL does not address every computer resource, such as a file on a local disk. C is wrong because a printer is reached through a print queue or an IP address, not by a URL. D is wrong because a storage server is only one of the many things a URL may point to. Exam tip: a URL answers two questions, where the resource is and how to fetch it.

The correct answer is C, Bakelite. Bakelite is a thermosetting polymer, made by condensing phenol with formaldehyde, and once it has set under heat its chains are cross-linked, so it cannot be melted and moulded again. That hardness and poor conduction of heat and electricity are why bakelite is used for switches, plugs, handles of pans and radio cabinets; it was prepared by Leo Baekeland and was the first fully synthetic plastic. Melamine and urea-formaldehyde resins behave in the same way. A is wrong because polythene is a thermoplastic that softens on heating and can be recycled into new articles. B is wrong because PVC is also a thermoplastic, used for pipes, cable covers and raincoats. D is wrong because neoprene is a synthetic rubber, that is an elastomer, valued for resisting oil and petrol. Exam tip: thermosetting means bakelite, melamine and urea-formaldehyde; thermoplastic means polythene, PVC and polystyrene.

The correct answer is C, poisons. A catalytic poison is a substance that lowers or destroys the activity of a catalyst, usually because it sticks firmly to the active surface and leaves no room for the reactants. Carbon monoxide and sulphur compounds poison platinum and nickel catalysts, which is why petrol for vehicles with a catalytic converter must be low in sulphur, and arsenic compounds poison the iron catalyst used in making ammonia. Such poisoning is often irreversible, so industrial gases are cleaned before they reach the catalyst bed. A is wrong because controller is not a term used in catalysis. B is wrong because a promoter does the opposite and raises the activity of a catalyst, as molybdenum does for iron in the Haber process. D is wrong because an initiator starts a chain reaction, for example in polymerisation, and is used up in it. Exam tip: promoter raises, poison lowers; molybdenum promotes iron in the Haber process.

The correct answer is B, Earthworm. The earthworm is called the farmer's friend because its work keeps soil fit for crops. As it burrows it loosens the soil and lets air and water reach the roots, and the castings it leaves behind are rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potash, so the topsoil is steadily renewed. Charles Darwin called earthworms nature's ploughmen for this reason. Farmers use the same habit in vermicomposting, where species such as Eisenia fetida turn cattle dung and crop waste into fine manure within a few weeks. A is wrong because the cockroach is a household pest that spoils food and carries germs. C is wrong because the honey bee is useful as a pollinator and for honey, but the name friend of the farmer is not given to it. D is wrong because the housefly spreads diseases such as typhoid and cholera. Exam tip: earthworm, the farmer's friend and nature's plough, used in vermicompost.

The correct answer is D, Price Index. A price index measures how the price of a commodity or of a basket of goods has moved between a base period and the current period, so the price of wheat over the years is read from a price index. The base year is given the value 100 and every later price is shown against it, which makes a long series comparable even when the rupee's value changes. In India the Wholesale Price Index and the Consumer Price Index are the best known price indices, and Laspeyres' formula uses base year quantities as weights while Paasche's formula uses current year quantities. A is wrong because a volume or quantity index tracks how much is produced or sold, not the price. B is wrong because an aggregate index is a way of building an index from several items and is not meant for one commodity's price. C is wrong because neither of those two answers fits. Exam tip: price index for prices, quantity index for output, value index for the two together.

The correct answer is D, Kanwar Sain. The engineer Kanwar Sain conceived the plan in 1948 of carrying the surplus water of the Sutlej and the Beas into the Thar desert, and the canal was taken up on his design. Work began on 31 March 1958 on what was then called the Rajasthan Canal, which draws water from the Harike barrage below the meeting of the Sutlej and the Beas in Punjab. It was renamed the Indira Gandhi Canal in 1984 and, with its branches, is the longest irrigation canal in India, turning parts of Sriganganagar, Hanumangarh, Bikaner and Jaisalmer into cropland. A is wrong because Mohanlal Sukhadia was a Chief Minister of Rajasthan in whose years the work went ahead. B is wrong because Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister of the day, not the author of the plan. C is wrong because Jainarayan Vyas was also a Chief Minister. Exam tip: conceived by Kanwar Sain in 1948, work started 1958, renamed 1984.

The correct answer is B, Tej Bahadur Sapru. The Liberal leader Tej Bahadur Sapru, working with M. R. Jayakar, brought Gandhi and Viceroy Lord Irwin to the table and is remembered as the mediator of the pact. The agreement was signed in Delhi on 5 March 1931 and is also called the Delhi Pact. Gandhi agreed to suspend the Civil Disobedience Movement and to attend the Second Round Table Conference in London, while the government agreed to release political prisoners not convicted of violence, to return confiscated property and to allow people on the coast to make salt for their own use. A is wrong because Motilal Nehru had died in February 1931, before the pact. C is wrong because Annie Besant led the Home Rule movement and had no part in it. D is wrong because C. Y. Chintamani was a Liberal editor and politician, not the mediator here. Exam tip: Gandhi-Irwin Pact, 5 March 1931, Delhi Pact, just before the Second Round Table Conference.

The correct answer is D, 243 (G). Article 243G allows a state legislature to endow Panchayats with the powers and authority they need to work as institutions of self-government. Part IX of the Constitution, which holds Articles 243 to 243-O, was inserted by the 73rd Constitutional Amendment Act of 1992 and came into force on 24 April 1993. Under Article 243G a state may give Panchayats the duty to prepare plans, to carry out schemes and to handle the subjects listed in the Eleventh Schedule, which names 29 items such as agriculture, drinking water, rural roads and primary education. A is wrong because Article 243A deals with the Gram Sabha, the village assembly of registered voters. B is wrong because there is no such Article; Article 356 covers President's rule in a state. C is wrong because Article 357 concerns the exercise of legislative powers during President's rule. Exam tip: 243A Gram Sabha, 243B constitution of Panchayats, 243G powers, Eleventh Schedule 29 subjects.

The correct answer is A, cotton. The pink bollworm is the most damaging pest of the cotton plant. Its larva bores into the boll and feeds on the developing seed and lint, so the damage is hidden until the boll opens, and it has developed resistance to some insect-resistant cotton varieties, which is why it keeps returning to the news.

Option B is wrong because silk is produced by the silkworm, which is reared rather than protected from pests of this kind, and the word bollworm itself points to a boll, a cotton structure. Option C is wrong because the main pests of mustard are the aphid and the sawfly. Option D is wrong because apple orchards suffer from the codling moth and the woolly aphid. Only cotton forms bolls, so only cotton can host a bollworm.

The correct answer is C, M3. The Reserve Bank of India publishes four measures of money supply, and M3 is the one called broad money, also known as aggregate monetary resources. It is made of currency with the public, demand deposits with banks, other deposits with the RBI and, above all, time deposits with banks. Adding time deposits captures almost all the money the banking system has created, which is why M3 is the figure policy makers watch. A is wrong because M1, currency plus demand deposits plus other deposits with the RBI, is narrow money, the most liquid measure of all. B is wrong because M2 is M1 plus savings deposits with post office savings banks, and it is still a narrow measure. D is wrong because M4 is M3 plus total post office deposits, the widest measure, but the name broad money belongs to M3. Exam tip: M1 and M2 are narrow, M3 and M4 are broad, and M3 is the benchmark.

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 C, Netscape. Netscape Navigator, released in 1994 by Netscape Communications, the company founded by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark, was the first web browser sold as a commercial product. It was the browser that carried the web to ordinary users in the mid nineties and at its peak held most of the market, before losing the browser war to Internet Explorer. A is wrong because Mosaic, built in 1993 at the NCSA of the University of Illinois, was the first widely used graphical browser but was academic software given away free, not a commercial product. B is wrong because Mozilla is the open source project born in 1998 from Netscape's released source code; its browser Firefox came in 2004 and is free. D is wrong because Internet Explorer arrived in 1995 and was bundled free with Windows rather than sold. Exam tip: Mosaic 1993 first popular graphical browser, Netscape Navigator 1994 first commercial browser, Firefox 2004 from the Mozilla project.

The correct answer is A, REL. An external stylesheet is attached to a page with a link tag written inside the head section, and the tag needs two things: href, which gives the address of the CSS file, and rel, which tells the browser what the linked file is for. Writing rel equals stylesheet is what marks the file as a set of style rules; leave rel out and the browser has no reason to treat the file as CSS, so the page appears unstyled. B is wrong because style is a separate way of writing CSS, either as a style block in the head or as an attribute on one element, and it has no part in linking an external file. C is wrong because body holds the visible content of the page while the link tag belongs in the head. D is wrong because html is the root element that wraps the whole document and has nothing to do with loading a stylesheet. Exam tip: link rel equals stylesheet with href, placed in the head.

The correct answer is C, Hepatitis B. The hepatitis B vaccine was the first vaccine made by recombinant DNA technology. Scientists cut out the gene for the surface protein of the hepatitis B virus and put it into yeast cells; the yeast then made that protein in large amounts, and the purified protein is injected as the vaccine. Because only one viral protein is used and no whole virus is involved, the vaccine cannot cause the disease, which is what makes recombinant vaccines safe. It was licensed in the mid 1980s and in India it is part of the pentavalent shot given to infants. A is wrong because the polio vaccine is either the killed virus of Salk or the weakened live virus of Sabin. B is wrong because no vaccine against AIDS has been licensed so far. D is wrong because the smallpox vaccine used the live vaccinia virus, and the disease was declared eradicated in 1980. Exam tip: hepatitis B, first recombinant vaccine, made in yeast from the surface antigen gene.

The correct answer is C, Graphics. In multimedia, graphics is the broad word for every kind of visual element a computer can store and show, so drawings, photographs, movies and simulations all sit inside it. The usual list of multimedia elements is text, graphics, audio, video and animation, and in that list graphics covers both pictures made by hand on the screen and pictures captured from the real world. Graphics are stored either as bitmaps, made of pixels, as in a JPEG or BMP photograph, or as vectors, made of lines and curves described by equations, as in a drawing or a CAD file. A is wrong because animation is only one kind of visual, a sequence of frames shown fast enough to look like movement. B is wrong because an image is a single still picture, so it is narrower than the four things listed. D is wrong because text is made of characters and carries no picture. Exam tip: multimedia elements are text, graphics, audio, video and animation; bitmap graphics use pixels, vector graphics use equations.

The correct answer is A, Physical Layer. The OSI model has seven layers and they are numbered from the bottom upwards, so Layer 1 is the physical layer, the one that actually carries bits over a copper cable, an optical fibre or a radio link. It fixes voltages, connectors, pin layouts, cable types and data rates, and it has nothing to do with the meaning of the data it carries. The full order from Layer 1 to Layer 7 is physical, data link, network, transport, session, presentation and application. B is wrong because the data link layer is Layer 2, which groups bits into frames and handles MAC addresses and error detection on one link. C is wrong because the transport layer is Layer 4, where TCP and UDP move data from end to end. D is wrong because the network layer is Layer 3, the layer of IP addresses and routing. Exam tip: the sentence Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away gives physical, data link, network, transport, session, presentation, application in order.

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.