2025

Under the SEBI (Alternative Investment Funds) Regulations, 2012, an AIF is a privately pooled investment vehicle that collects funds from investors for investing per a defined policy, and is placed in three categories. Hedge Funds are expressly Category III AIFs, which employ diverse or complex trading strategies including leverage. Venture Capital funds are expressly Category I AIFs, alongside SME funds, social venture funds and infrastructure funds. Both are therefore AIFs. Bonds are debt securities and Stocks are equity securities: these are conventional asset classes and instruments in which funds invest, not pooled investment vehicles, and the AIF Regulations do not treat them as AIFs. The count is therefore two, giving (b).

• Option (a) understates by omitting one of the two pooled vehicles.
• Option (c) would require one of Bonds or Stocks to qualify, which confuses an underlying security with a fund structure.
• Option (d) would treat every listed investment avenue as an AIF, which collapses the entire distinction the regulations are built on.

• Statement I is correct: the RBI holds a large portfolio of government securities and earns interest on it, while open market operations in those securities also generate trading gains.
• Statement II is correct: the RBI transacts in foreign currency in the course of exchange rate management and earns returns on its foreign currency assets, and these form a major component of its income.
• Statement III is incorrect: pension fund management is not an RBI function, being handled by PFRDA-regulated pension fund managers.
• Statement IV is incorrect: the RBI is the banker to banks and to government and does not lend to private companies; its lending is to scheduled banks and select financial institutions.
• Statement V is incorrect on two counts. Printing is a cost item rather than an income item, and the physical printing and minting are carried out by BRBNMPL and SPMCIL, with the RBI bearing the expenditure of currency management. Only I and II qualify, giving (a).
• Options (b), (c) and (d) each require at least one of the three expenditure or non-function items to be counted as income, which inverts the RBI balance sheet.

• Statement I is incorrect on two independent grounds, either of which is enough to reject it. The mandating authority is SEBI, the securities market regulator, not the RBI, which regulates banking and monetary policy. Further, the requirement does not extend to all listed companies: it applies to the top listed entities by market capitalisation, initially the top 1000, with a phased extension of assured BRSR Core disclosures. The word all is therefore also fatal.
• Statement II is correct: the BRSR is an environmental, social and governance disclosure framework built around the nine NGRBC principles, covering emissions, energy and water use, workforce and safety data, community engagement and governance practices. These are non-financial disclosures, which is precisely why the framework exists alongside, rather than inside, conventional financial reporting. Only II holds, giving (b).
• Option (a) requires the regulator and the coverage to both be right, option (c) requires the same, and option (d) wrongly rejects the settled non-financial character of the report.

• Statement I is incorrect. Section 2(1A) of the Income-tax Act, 1961 defines agricultural income narrowly, requiring rent or revenue derived from land used for agricultural purposes, or income from the actual performance of agricultural operations on that land. Poultry farming, dairying, wool rearing, fish rearing and similar allied activities are not carried on upon the land in the required sense and are consistently treated as taxable business income, not exempt agricultural income. The blanket phrase exempted from any tax is therefore wrong.
• Statement II is correct. Section 2(14) excludes rural agricultural land, defined by distance from municipal limits and population thresholds, from the definition of capital asset, with the consequence that its transfer does not attract capital gains tax. Since I fails and II holds, the answer is (d).
• Options (a) and (b) both require Statement I to be correct, which the treatment of allied activities defeats.
• Option (c) inverts the position entirely. It is worth noting that even if both had been correct, the explanatory link would not exist, since one concerns exemption of income and the other the capital asset definition.

• Statement I is correct: India was admitted to the Minerals Security Partnership, the US-led plurilateral aimed at securing resilient critical mineral supply chains, in 2023.
• Statement II is incorrect and is the decisive elimination. The Ministry of Mines identified 30 critical minerals precisely because India is import-dependent or resource-deficient in most of them, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, germanium and the heavy rare earths. Identifying a mineral as critical is an admission of vulnerability, not of endowment, so the word all makes the statement self-defeating.
• Statement III is correct: the MMDR Amendment Act, 2023 inserted a list of critical and strategic minerals in Part D of the First Schedule and reserved to the Central Government the power to auction mining leases and composite licences for them, while royalty continues to accrue to the States. Since only I and III stand, the answer is (c).
• Options (a), (b) and (d) all require Statement II, which cannot survive the logic of the critical minerals list itself. A candidate who understood why the list was drawn up could eliminate three options without knowing either of the other two facts.

• Statement I is correct: bondholders receive contractually fixed coupon payments irrespective of profitability, whereas stockholders receive dividends only if declared out of profits and bear the residual risk, so bondholders are at lower risk.
• Statement II is correct and is a definitional statement: a bond is a debt instrument creating a creditor relationship, while a share confers ownership and residual claim.
• Statement III is correct: in liquidation the waterfall places secured and unsecured creditors, including bondholders, ahead of equity holders, who rank last. Both II and III genuinely explain I, and they explain it from two different directions.
• Statement II supplies the legal character of the claim, and Statement III supplies the consequence of that character at the moment of repayment. Together they account for the lower risk asserted in Statement I, giving (a).
• Option (b) misstates the direction of explanation, since the definitional statement explains the risk statement and not the reverse.
• Option (c) requires one of II or III to be false, but both are sound.
• Option (d) rejects both, which is untenable.

• Statement I is correct: by contract volume India came to account for the overwhelming majority of global equity option contracts traded, a share widely reported at around three-quarters or more, driven by index options with short expiries.
• Statement II is correct: Indian equity market capitalisation grew sharply and surpassed that of Hong Kong at a point in early 2024, making India among the largest markets by that measure.
• Statement III is incorrect and is the intended trap. SEBI both warns retail investors about derivatives risk, including through its published studies showing that the large majority of individual traders in the futures and options segment lose money, and acts against unregistered investment advisers and finfluencers under the Investment Advisers Regulations. The presence of a regulator is the settled position, so any option containing III fails. That leaves (a).
• Options (b) and (c) each retain III, and option (d) retains it as well. A candidate who knew only that SEBI exists in this role could eliminate three options directly.

The circular economy replaces the linear take, make, dispose model with cycles of reuse, repair, remanufacture and recycling, so that materials are retained in the economy at their highest value for as long as possible.

• Statement II is correct: closing material loops displaces virgin material demand, which is the defining feature of circularity.
• Statement III is correct: designing out waste and recovering by-products reduces losses at every stage of production.
• Statement I is correct and follows from both. Primary material extraction and processing, including mining, smelting, cement clinker production and virgin plastic manufacture, are highly energy and emission intensive, so cutting virgin input demand cuts embodied emissions. Independently, reducing process wastage lowers the energy and material throughput needed per unit of useful output, which again lowers emissions. Both II and III therefore explain I through distinct causal routes, giving (a).
• Option (b) understates by allowing only one explanatory link, when both operate.
• Option (c) requires one of II or III to be false, which contradicts the definition of circularity.
• Option (d) rejects both and is untenable.

• Statement I is correct and is the standard definition: a receipt is capital in nature if it either creates a liability for the government or reduces its assets, which is exactly what distinguishes it from a revenue receipt.
• Statement II is correct and supplies one instance of each limb. Borrowings create a liability, since the principal must be repaid, and are debt-creating capital receipts. Disinvestment reduces the government's asset holding in a public sector enterprise and is a non-debt-creating capital receipt.
• Statement III is incorrect and inverts the direction of the flow. Interest received on loans advanced by the government is money coming in on an asset the government holds; it neither creates a liability nor reduces an asset, and is classified as a revenue receipt. It is interest paid by the government that reflects a liability, and even then the payment is revenue expenditure, not a receipt. Only I and II hold, giving (a).
• Options (b), (c) and (d) all retain Statement III, which fails on the settled revenue and capital classification.

• Statement I is correct. Roy was a serious student of Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic learning, translated the Vedanta and several Upanishads into Bengali and English, and grounded his critique of idolatry and ritual in the authority of the ancient texts themselves. His argument was that contemporary practice had departed from the monotheism of the original sources, which presupposes respect for those sources rather than rejection of them.
• Statement II is correct. He championed rational and scientific enquiry, campaigned for modern Western education alongside indigenous learning, opposed sati, defended women's property rights and argued against polygamy and the degraded status of women. The two statements are not in tension: this combination of reverence for the classical inheritance with insistence on reason and social equality is the defining feature of his reformism, and the standard textbook formulation. Both hold, giving (c).
• Options (a) and (b) each require one settled statement to be rejected, and option (d) rejects both, which no reading of Roy supports.

Item I was part of the programme: boycott of law courts by lawyers and litigants, and boycott of foreign cloth accompanied by the promotion of khadi, were among the central planks. Item II was part of the programme: strict non-violence was the non-negotiable condition of the movement, and Gandhi's withdrawal of it after the Chauri Chaura violence in February 1922 demonstrates how binding he considered it. Item III is incorrect and is the intended distractor. The programme called for the surrender of titles and honorary offices conferred by the government, not their retention with private use only. Retention of any kind would have defeated the symbolic purpose of the renunciation. Item IV was part of the programme: the constructive side of non-cooperation included the establishment of panchayats to settle disputes, as the counterpart to boycotting the colonial courts, since litigants withdrawing from the courts needed an alternative forum. Three items therefore qualify, giving (c).

• Option (d) requires the surrender of titles to be read as retention.
• Options (a) and (b) understate, and would require rejecting either the non-violence condition or the panchayat provision, both of which are well attested.

The term araghatta derives from ara, meaning the spoke of a wheel, and ghatta, meaning a pot. The device was a wheel fitted with earthen pots at the ends of its spokes or on a chain around its rim, which dipped into a well or tank as the wheel rotated and emptied at the top into a channel. It is the ancestor of what later came to be called the Persian wheel, and its etymology is itself the key to the answer, giving (b).

• Option (a) describes the charas or mot, a leather bag drawn over a pulley by bullocks, which is a distinct and simpler lift device.
• Option (c) describes no recognised mechanism, since a single large pot driven by bullocks does not correspond to the wheel and pot arrangement the term denotes.
• Option (d) describes ordinary manual drawing of water from a well, which requires no named device at all and would not have been recorded as a technological advance in the sources.

The Pallava ruler Mahendravarman I bore an unusually large number of birudas or titles, recorded in his cave temple inscriptions, and these three are among the best attested. Mattavilasa, meaning delight of the intoxicated, is also the title of the Sanskrit satirical farce Mattavilasa Prahasana attributed to him, which ridicules Kapalika and Buddhist ascetics. Vichitrachitta, meaning curious minded, reflects his reputation for versatility in music, painting and architecture, and Gunabhara means bearer of virtues. He is credited with initiating rock cut cave architecture in the Pallava realm, giving (a).

• Option (c), Narasimhavarman I, is his son, better known as Mamalla, victor over Pulakesin II and associated with the monolithic rathas at Mamallapuram; his titles are different.
• Option (b), Simhavishnu, was the earlier Pallava ruler who consolidated the dynasty in the sixth century.
• Option (d), Simhavarman, belongs to the earlier Pallava line and is not associated with these titles.

Fa-hien travelled to India in the early fifth century, roughly 399 to 414 CE, in search of Buddhist texts and monastic disciplinary codes, and his account is preserved as the Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms. This period falls within the reign of Chandragupta II, giving (b). His narrative is notable for describing a prosperous and peaceful Madhyadesha with light administration, and for saying almost nothing about the ruler himself, since his interest was religious rather than political.

• Option (a), Samudragupta, preceded Chandragupta II and is known from the Allahabad pillar inscription of Harisena.
• Option (c), Kumaragupta I, and option (d), Skandagupta, both belong to the period after Fa-hien's departure, with Skandagupta's reign associated with the Huna invasions and the Junagadh inscription recording repair of the Sudarshana lake. A common confusion to guard against is with the later pilgrims: Hiuen Tsang travelled during Harshavardhana's reign and I-tsing later still.

Rajendra I, the Chola ruler, launched the naval expedition against Srivijaya in the early eleventh century, recorded in the Tanjore inscriptions, which name a series of ports and territories in the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra that were raided. The campaign is best understood as an assertion of control over the Strait of Malacca and the maritime route to China, protecting Chola merchant guild interests rather than establishing lasting territorial rule. This gives (c).

• Option (a), Amoghavarsha, was a Rashtrakuta ruler of the ninth century, a patron of Jainism and author of the Kavirajamarga, with no naval expedition of this kind.
• Option (b), Prataparudra of the Kakatiyas, ruled in the Deccan in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and faced the Delhi Sultanate invasions.
• Option (d), Vishnuvardhana of the Hoysalas, is associated with the Chennakesava temple at Belur and with the shift from Jainism to Vaishnavism under Ramanuja's influence. Only the Cholas among these possessed the naval capacity for a trans-oceanic campaign.

Vishnu Digambar Paluskar founded the first Gandharva Mahavidyalaya at Lahore in 1901, giving (d). His significance lies in taking Hindustani classical music out of the closed gharana and hereditary patronage system and placing it in a public institutional setting with a published notation system, fees, examinations and open admission, including for students outside traditional musician families. He later established a branch in Bombay in 1908.

• Option (a), Delhi, is where the institution came to have a prominent later presence, which is the likely source of confusion, but not the site of the first school.
• Option (b), Gwalior, is a major gharana centre and Paluskar's own training lineage connects to that tradition, but the school was not founded there.
• Option (c), Ujjain, has no association with the institution. A related figure worth distinguishing is Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, who worked on the classification of ragas into thaats and on notation, and is often conflated with Paluskar in memory.

These three officers appear together in the Third Major Rock Edict, which directs them to go out on tour every five years for the propagation of dhamma and for the discharge of ordinary administrative business. They are consistently placed at the district level in the standard reconstruction of Mauryan administration. The Pradeshika was the district head with general charge, the Rajuka exercised revenue and judicial functions and is described in Pillar Edict IV as having been granted independence in judicial matters, and the Yukta was a subordinate officer handling accounts and secretarial work. This gives (b).

• Option (a) is wrong because village level administration rested with the Gramika and the village elders, who are separate.
• Option (c) is wrong because the provinces were headed by Kumaras or princes of royal blood stationed at Taxila, Ujjain, Tosali and Suvarnagiri.
• Option (d) is wrong because the central administration comprised the Mantriparishad and the tirthas or high functionaries such as the Samaharta and Sannidhata, again a distinct tier.

• Statement I is correct. At the Nagpur session in December 1920 the Congress amended its constitution and redefined its goal as the attainment of Swaraj by all legitimate and peaceful means, replacing the earlier formulation of self-government within the Empire through constitutional means. The change of wording is significant because it left the term Swaraj deliberately open, allowing both moderates and those seeking complete independence to remain within the fold.
• Statement II is correct. The programme was conceived in phases, beginning with the surrender of titles and the boycott of legislatures, courts and schools, and moving to the more confrontational measures of mass civil disobedience and non-payment of taxes only at a later stage, contingent on Swaraj not being achieved within a year and on the government resorting to repression. This staged design reflected Gandhi's insistence that the movement build discipline before escalating. Both statements hold, giving (c).
• Options (a) and (b) each reject one accurate statement, and option (d) rejects both.

• Statement I is correct. India accounts for the dominant share of world turmeric production, commonly cited at around seventy to eighty per cent, and is simultaneously the largest exporter and the largest consumer, with major export destinations including Bangladesh, the UAE, the United States and Malaysia.
• Statement II is correct. More than thirty varieties of turmeric are grown across some twenty states, differing in curcumin content, duration and rhizome character, with well-known regional types including Lakadong, Alleppey Finger, Erode and Rajapuri.
• Statement III is correct. Maharashtra, Telangana, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are among the leading producing states, along with Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and West Bengal. All three statements therefore hold, giving (d).
• Options (a), (b) and (c) each drop one accurate statement. The question sits close to a news trigger, since the National Turmeric Board was constituted in 2023 to support production, value addition and export promotion, though the content tested is standard agricultural geography rather than the Board itself.

All three are among the classic evidences Wegener and his successors advanced for continental drift, and all three appear in the standard treatment in the NCERT physical geography text, giving (c).

• Statement I is the argument from rock and structural continuity: a belt of ancient rocks of comparable age and composition runs along the Brazilian coast and reappears on the coast of western Africa, which is difficult to explain unless the two margins were once joined.
• Statement II is the placer gold argument: the gold-bearing deposits of the Ghana coast lack a corresponding source rock nearby, while the Brazilian plateau supplies a plausible parent, implying juxtaposition of the two landmasses at the time of deposition.
• Statement III is the argument from the Gondwana sediments: the sequence found in peninsular India, characterised by tillite at its base indicating glaciation, has counterparts across Africa, Madagascar, Australia, Antarctica, the Falklands and South America, pointing to a single former supercontinent.
• Options (a), (b) and (d) each omit one of the three, and none of the statements contains an error that would justify its exclusion.

• Statement I is correct and reproduces the standard textbook position: dust concentration is highest over subtropical and temperate latitudes and lowest over equatorial and polar regions.
• Statement II is incorrect, and it inverts the very reason Statement I holds. Subtropical and temperate areas have more dry winds, not less. The subtropical belt is dominated by descending limbs of the Hadley circulation, producing arid and semi-arid surfaces with sparse vegetation cover from which fine particles are readily lifted. By contrast the equatorial belt has heavy convectional rainfall, dense vegetation and high humidity, so particles are both less available and continuously scavenged from the air by precipitation, while polar regions have frozen or snow-covered surfaces offering little loose material. Since I holds and II fails, the answer is (c).
• Options (a) and (b) both require Statement II to be correct.
• Option (d) rejects the dust distribution itself, which is well established. The trap rewards a candidate who notices that the given explanation contradicts rather than supports the observation.

January is winter in the Northern Hemisphere.

• Statement II is correct because of the differential heating and cooling of land and water: land has low specific heat and heats and cools rapidly, while water has high specific heat, mixes vertically and is partly transparent to insolation, so it retains heat far longer. In winter the continents therefore cool sharply while the adjacent oceans remain relatively warm.
• Statement I is correct and follows directly. An isotherm joins points of equal temperature, so where it crosses a cold landmass it must swing towards the equator to find that temperature, and where it crosses a warmer ocean it swings towards the pole. The bending is thus a map expression of the land and sea contrast, which means Statement II genuinely explains Statement I, giving (a).
• Option (b) concedes both statements but denies the causal link, which cannot stand since the temperature contrast is the sole cause of the deflection.
• Options (c) and (d) each reject one correct statement. Note that in July the pattern reverses, with isotherms bending poleward over the heated landmasses.

This question turns entirely on the distinction between porosity and permeability, and rewards the candidate who holds the two apart. Porosity is the proportion of void space in a rock; permeability is the ability of fluid to pass through it, which depends on whether those voids are large and interconnected.

• Statement I is correct: chalk is a highly permeable rock and forms important aquifers, while clay is the classic aquiclude.
• Statement II is correct: chalk is porous, with well-connected pore spaces and fissures that both hold and transmit water, and this explains the permeability asserted in Statement I.
• Statement III is incorrect, and this is the decisive point. Clay is in fact highly porous, often with porosity of forty to fifty per cent, which is comparable to or greater than many permeable rocks. It is impermeable not because it lacks voids but because its pores are extremely fine and poorly connected, so capillary and surface tension forces hold water in place rather than transmitting it. Only Statement II is correct and it does explain Statement I, giving (c).
• Options (a) and (b) both require Statement III to stand, and option (d) wrongly rejects the porosity of chalk.

• Statement I is correct. Balancing absorbed solar radiation against emitted longwave radiation gives Earth an effective radiating temperature of about minus eighteen degrees Celsius, well below freezing. The observed global mean of roughly fifteen degrees Celsius is the difference made by the atmosphere, so without it the surface would indeed be frozen almost everywhere.
• Statement II is correct and states the mechanism: the atmosphere is largely transparent to incoming shortwave solar radiation but absorbs a substantial part of the outgoing longwave terrestrial radiation, re-emitting it in all directions including downward, which raises the equilibrium surface temperature.
• Statement III is correct. Molecular structure decides radiative behaviour. Nitrogen and oxygen, being homonuclear diatomic molecules with no dipole moment, are effectively transparent to longwave radiation, whereas carbon dioxide, water vapour, methane and nitrous oxide possess vibrational modes that produce a changing dipole moment and therefore absorb strongly in the infrared. All three hold, giving (c).
• Options (a), (b) and (d) each omit one correct statement. Note that the question describes the natural greenhouse effect, which makes the planet habitable, and not the enhanced anthropogenic effect.

• Statement I is correct and reproduces the official rationale of the mission. Indigenous cattle breeds are disproportionately held by small and marginal farmers and landless labourers, and their yields are low relative to crossbred animals, so raising their productivity has a direct and progressive effect on rural incomes. The distributional argument is precisely why the programme is framed as a poverty-linked intervention rather than a purely productivity one.
• Statement II is correct and states the stated objective: the Rashtriya Gokul Mission was launched in 2014 under the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying for the development and conservation of indigenous bovine breeds in a scientific and holistic manner, working through instruments such as Gokul Grams, breed improvement using artificial insemination and sex-sorted semen, and the National Kamdhenu Breeding Centres. Both statements hold, giving (c).
• Options (a) and (b) each reject one accurate statement, and option (d) rejects both, which no reading of the scheme documents supports.

• Statement I is correct: cement production is consistently estimated to contribute somewhere between five and eight per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions, so the threshold of more than five per cent is safely met.
• Statement II is correct as a description of the raw mix: cement manufacture combines limestone as the calcareous component with silica-bearing clay or shale as the argillaceous component supplying silica, alumina and iron, which together form the clinker minerals.
• Statement III is correct and is the chemistry that matters: during clinkerisation in the kiln, calcium carbonate decomposes to calcium oxide and carbon dioxide, and this calcination reaction releases carbon dioxide from the raw material itself, independently of the fuel burnt to heat the kiln. Process emissions of this kind account for roughly sixty per cent of the sector's carbon dioxide, which is why cement is described as hard to abate: even a kiln fired entirely by renewable energy would still emit.
• Statement III therefore explains Statement I, while Statement II merely describes the ingredients and identifies no emitting reaction. Both are correct but only one explains, giving (b).
• Option (a) overstates the explanatory role of the raw mix, option (c) requires one of the two to be false, and option (d) rejects settled chemistry.

• Statement I is correct: India was among the countries that did not sign the UAE Declaration on Climate and Health at COP28 in December 2023, although a large majority of parties endorsed it.
• Statement II is incorrect, and this is the decisive elimination. The declaration is a voluntary political statement carrying no legal obligation, and it is not a binding instrument creating a mandatory duty to decarbonise the health sector. Almost no COP side declaration of this type is binding, so a candidate who knows the general character of such declarations can reject Statement II without knowing anything about this one.
• Statement III is treated as correct: the reported Indian concern was that commitments to cut emissions from health infrastructure would constrain the expansion of cooling, cold chain and continuous power in health facilities, which are themselves essential to health system resilience in a hot climate. On that reading only Statement III is correct and it does account for the refusal in Statement I, giving (c).
• Options (a) and (b) both require the binding character asserted in Statement II, and option (d) rejects the very reason India gave.

• Statement I is correct: polar motion, the wandering of the rotation axis relative to the crust, is measured continuously, and published work attributes a significant part of the recent drift, along with a lengthening of the day, to redistribution of mass at the surface.
• Statement II is correct as a standalone fact: solar flares and coronal mass ejections do deposit very large amounts of energy in the outermost atmosphere, heating and expanding the thermosphere, driving geomagnetic storms and increasing satellite drag.
• Statement III is correct: meltwater from the polar ice sheets does not stay at high latitudes but is redistributed through the oceans, with a net transfer of mass towards lower latitudes. The discriminating step is the explanatory link. Moving mass from the poles towards the equator increases the Earth's moment of inertia about the rotation axis and alters the mass distribution relative to that axis, which by conservation of angular momentum slows the rotation slightly and shifts the pole.
• Statement III therefore explains Statement I.
• Statement II does not: solar energy input affects the upper atmosphere and the magnetosphere, but is far too small and too external to move the rotation axis of a body of the Earth's mass. Both are correct, only one explains, giving (b).
• Option (a) wrongly admits the solar link, option (c) requires one statement to be false, and option (d) rejects both.

Article 6 provides the framework for voluntary cooperation between parties in meeting their nationally determined contributions, and it has three operative limbs. Article 6.2 permits cooperative approaches involving internationally transferred mitigation outcomes, with corresponding adjustments to prevent double counting. Article 6.4 establishes a centralised crediting mechanism under the supervision of a Supervisory Body, succeeding the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto era. Article 6.8 provides a framework for non-market approaches, covering cooperation through finance, technology transfer and capacity building where no credits change hands.

• Statement II is therefore correct as a description of the market limbs, and Statement III is correct as a description of the non-market limb.
• Statement I is correct, and both II and III explain it: Article 6 attracts sustained attention precisely because it carries both the market and the non-market architecture of the Agreement, and it was the last major element of the Paris rulebook to be settled. Both explain, giving (a).
• Option (b) admits only one explanatory link when both limbs contribute.
• Option (c) requires one to be false, and option (d) rejects both, either of which would leave Article 6 with no content.

The Asian Development Bank launched the Nature Solutions Finance Hub for Asia and the Pacific at COP28, giving (a). The Hub is designed to develop and finance a pipeline of nature-positive investments across the region, mobilising private capital for natural capital through instruments such as blue and green bonds, debt for nature arrangements and blended finance structures, and it sits within the ADB's broader commitment to natural capital and ocean health financing in Asia and the Pacific. The remaining options are all multilateral development banks with plausible-sounding mandates, which is what makes this a pure recall question with no elimination route.

• Option (b), the AIIB, is infrastructure-focused and headquartered in Beijing.
• Option (c), the New Development Bank, is the BRICS institution based in Shanghai.
• Option (d), the IBRD, is the World Bank arm lending to middle income countries and has no such regional hub. A candidate could reason weakly towards the ADB on the ground that the Hub is explicitly regional to Asia and the Pacific, which is the ADB's defining geographic mandate, but this is a soft inference rather than a reliable elimination.

Direct Air Capture uses chemical sorbents or solvents to extract carbon dioxide from ambient air, in which it is present at only about four hundred parts per million, which is what makes the process energy intensive compared with capture from a concentrated flue gas stream.

• Statement I is correct: the captured stream can be compressed and injected into deep geological formations such as saline aquifers or basalt, where mineralisation locks it away, which is carbon sequestration in the strict sense.
• Statement II is correct: captured carbon dioxide serves as a chemical feedstock, and routes exist to polymers and plastics through polycarbonates and polyols, while food-grade carbon dioxide is used in carbonation, modified atmosphere packaging and as a processing agent.
• Statement III is correct: combining captured carbon dioxide with hydrogen, ideally produced by electrolysis using renewable power, yields synthetic hydrocarbon fuels through Fischer-Tropsch or methanol pathways, and this is the principal route being pursued for sustainable aviation fuel where direct electrification is not feasible. All three hold, giving (c).
• Options (a) and (b) each drop correct applications, and option (d) rejects the technology's established uses.

• Statement I is incorrect on two independent counts, and either alone is fatal. Taxonomically the Peacock tarantula, Poecilotheria metallica, is an arachnid of the class Arachnida, with eight legs, two body segments and no antennae, whereas crustaceans are a separate subphylum characterised by two pairs of antennae and typically aquatic respiration. Dietarily it is a predator taking insects and other small arthropods, not an omnivore.
• Statement II is correct: the species is endemic to a very small patch of deciduous forest in the Eastern Ghats, in the Nandyal and Giddalur region of Andhra Pradesh, and this extreme restriction of range, compounded by habitat degradation and collection for the exotic pet trade, is why the IUCN lists it as Critically Endangered.
• Statement III is correct: it is arboreal, sheltering in holes and crevices of tall trees and spinning asymmetric funnel webs there, rather than living in ground burrows as many tarantulas do.
• Statements II and III hold, giving (d).
• Options (a) and (b) both retain the crustacean claim, and option (c) needlessly discards the arboreal habit. The taxonomic error in Statement I is the intended discriminator.

• Statement I is incorrect and the figure is badly understated. India's carbon dioxide emissions are of the order of two tonnes per capita, roughly half the world average and far below the United States or China, but nowhere near as low as half a tonne. India's standard negotiating position rests on being well below the global average, not on being at a level associated with the least developed economies, so the claim misrepresents even the argument India makes.
• Statement II is correct: in absolute emissions from fuel combustion India ranks second in the Asia-Pacific region, behind China, and third globally after China and the United States. The pairing of a low per capita figure with a very high absolute figure is the central fact of India's emissions profile.
• Statement III is correct: electricity and heat production is the single largest emitting sector in India, reflecting the continued dominance of coal in the generation mix, ahead of industry, transport and buildings.
• Statements II and III hold, giving (c).
• Options (a) and (d) both retain the erroneous per capita figure, and option (b) discards the accurate sectoral statement.

• Statement I is incorrect. Oceans, not rainforests, are the larger source of photosynthetic oxygen production. The popular description of the Amazon as the lungs of the planet is misleading in a further respect: a mature rainforest is close to carbon and oxygen neutral, because the oxygen released by photosynthesis is very largely consumed again by plant respiration and by microbial decomposition of litter on the forest floor.
• Statement II is correct: marine phytoplankton together with photosynthetic bacteria, notably cyanobacteria such as Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus, account for roughly half of global oxygen production, and by some estimates more.
• Statement III is incorrect, and the magnitudes are worth being precise about. Atmospheric air is about twenty-one per cent oxygen by volume, whereas even well-oxygenated surface water holds only about eight to ten milligrams of dissolved oxygen per litre, a concentration lower than air by a large factor rather than several folds higher. This scarcity of dissolved oxygen is exactly why aquatic organisms need gills with large surface areas and countercurrent exchange, and why warming water, which holds still less oxygen, threatens aquatic life. Only II holds, giving (b).
• Options (a) and (c) each retain a false statement, and option (d) discards the accurate one.

Every statement is universally quantified by the word all, and a single counterexample defeats each.

• Statement I is incorrect: fixed-wing UAVs generate lift from forward airspeed over the wing and cannot descend vertically under control, requiring a runway, a parachute, a net or a belly landing, which is why hybrid VTOL configurations were developed.
• Statement II is incorrect for the same aerodynamic reason: sustained hovering requires thrust directed against gravity from rotors, so rotary-wing and multirotor platforms hover while fixed-wing aircraft must maintain forward speed above stall and can at best loiter in a circle.
• Statement III is incorrect: while small multirotors are typically battery powered, larger and longer-endurance UAVs use internal combustion or turbine engines, and hydrogen fuel cells and solar power are also employed, with energy density being the binding constraint since batteries cannot yet deliver the endurance that military and surveillance roles demand. None of the statements holds, giving (d).
• Options (a), (b) and (c) each require at least one universal claim to survive, and the fixed-wing counterexample alone defeats the first two. Extreme quantifiers of this kind are a reliable signal in Prelims.

In a lithium-ion cell the cathode is a lithium metal oxide and the anode is almost always graphite, and this division is the whole content of the question. Cobalt, lithium and nickel are cathode constituents: the dominant chemistries are nickel manganese cobalt oxide and nickel cobalt aluminium oxide, alongside lithium iron phosphate which dispenses with nickel and cobalt, and lithium is present in every cathode formulation since it supplies the ions that shuttle during cycling. Graphite is the anode material, chosen because its layered structure intercalates lithium ions reversibly between graphene planes at a potential close to that of lithium metal without the dendrite formation that plagues lithium metal anodes. Three elements therefore belong to the cathode, giving (c).

• Option (d) requires graphite to be counted as a cathode material, which reverses the electrode assignment.
• Options (a) and (b) understate, and would require excluding one of the three genuine cathode elements. The practical significance is that cobalt and nickel supply concerns drive cathode chemistry away from cobalt-rich formulations, while graphite supply is a separate and equally concentrated bottleneck on the anode side.

All three are high explosives used in military munitions, giving (b). They belong to the class of nitrogen-rich energetic materials, and the family also includes the more familiar RDX and TNT. The distinctions among them concern the balance between energy release and stability: some members of the class are valued for high detonation performance, while others are developed as insensitive munitions, meaning they resist accidental initiation by shock, fire or fragment impact during storage and handling, which is a major safety consideration for naval and aircraft magazines.

• Option (a) is wrong because refrigerant replacements for hydrofluorocarbons are hydrofluoroolefins, ammonia, carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons, an entirely unrelated chemistry driven by the Kigali Amendment.
• Option (c) is wrong because cruise missile propulsion uses conventional liquid hydrocarbon fuel in a turbojet or turbofan, and these compounds would sit in the warhead rather than the fuel tank.
• Option (d) is wrong for a related reason: solid rocket propellants are formulated from an oxidiser such as ammonium perchlorate with a metallic fuel and a polymeric binder, and although some energetic materials appear as propellant additives, that is not the defining characteristic of this group.

• Statement I is correct: Majorana 1 was announced as a quantum processing chip built on a topological approach, using engineered structures intended to host Majorana zero modes so that quantum information is stored non-locally and is therefore intrinsically more resistant to decoherence, which is the central obstacle to scaling quantum computers.
• Statement II is incorrect and is the sole discriminator: the chip was announced by Microsoft, which has pursued the topological qubit route for years, not by Amazon Web Services, whose quantum efforts run under a different programme and chip lineage.
• Statement III is correct and is a definitional matter: artificial intelligence is the broadest category, machine learning is the subset of approaches that learn patterns from data rather than following explicitly programmed rules, and deep learning is in turn the subset of machine learning that uses multi-layered neural networks to learn hierarchical representations.
• Statements I and III hold, giving (c).
• Options (a) and (d) both retain the wrong attribution, and option (b) drops the accurate statement about the chip while keeping the false one. A candidate certain only of the nesting relationship in Statement III could narrow the field to (b), (c) and (d).

• Statement I is correct: monoclonal antibodies are laboratory-produced immunoglobulin proteins, classically generated by hybridoma technology in which an antibody-producing B cell is fused with a myeloma cell to create an immortal clone secreting a single antibody specificity, and now increasingly by recombinant and humanised methods. The term monoclonal captures exactly this, that all molecules derive from one clone and are therefore identical, in contrast to the polyclonal mixture produced by a natural immune response.
• Statement II is correct: their therapeutic action rests on binding a chosen antigen with high specificity, which can neutralise a pathogen directly by blocking entry, or recruit immune effector functions such as complement activation and antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity.
• Statement III is correct: the monoclonal antibody m102.4 has been used against Nipah virus, including on a compassionate basis during outbreaks in Kerala, and monoclonals have also been deployed against Ebola, respiratory syncytial virus and, during the pandemic, SARS-CoV-2. All three hold, giving (d).
• Options (a), (b) and (c) each drop one accurate statement, with no error present in any of the three to justify exclusion.

All three statements are false, giving (d), and each is phrased as a universal negative that a single counterexample destroys.

• Statement I is incorrect: seawater is the most virus-rich environment known, holding on the order of ten million virus particles per millilitre, and marine viruses are a major ecological force, lysing bacterial and phytoplankton populations and thereby driving the viral shunt that recycles organic carbon and nutrients in surface waters.
• Statement II is incorrect: bacteriophages are viruses that specifically infect bacteria, they were central to the foundational experiments of molecular biology including the Hershey and Chase demonstration that DNA is the genetic material, and phage therapy is under renewed investigation as antibiotic resistance spreads.
• Statement III is incorrect: altering host transcription is fundamental to how viruses replicate, since they must divert host machinery to make viral products, and some go further by integrating into the host genome, as retroviruses do, or by driving oncogenesis through sustained transcriptional dysregulation, as human papillomavirus does. None holds, giving (d).
• Options (a), (b) and (c) each require at least one absolute negation to survive, and none can.

The wording of Statement I carries two distinct claims, that activated carbon is good and that it is attractive, and each of the following statements answers one of them, which is what makes both explanatory.

• Statement II is correct and explains why it is good, that is technically effective. Activation produces an extensively microporous structure with specific surface areas typically in the range of five hundred to fifteen hundred square metres per gram, and adsorption is a surface phenomenon, so this enormous internal area gives high capacity for organic compounds and heavy metal species.
• Statement III is correct and explains why it is attractive, that is economically and environmentally appealing. Activated carbon can be prepared from carbon-rich residues such as coconut shell, rice husk, bagasse, sawdust and other agricultural and industrial wastes, so a low-value waste stream is converted into a treatment material, which lowers cost and adds a circularity benefit. Both statements are correct and both explain Statement I, giving (a).
• Option (b) admits only one explanatory link and misses that the stem makes two claims.
• Option (c) requires one statement to be false, and option (d) rejects both, contradicting the established basis of adsorption technology.

The governing principle is Article 123(2), under which an Ordinance promulgated by the President has the same force and effect as an Act of Parliament.

• Statement I follows directly and is correct: since an Ordinance carries the force of an Act, it can amend or repeal a Central Act, just as a later Act could.
• Statement III is correct for the same reason: an Ordinance may be made retrospective in operation, exactly as legislation may be, and there is no bar on backdating its commencement.
• Statement II is incorrect, and the limitation is express. Article 123(3) provides that an Ordinance making any provision which Parliament would not under the Constitution be competent to enact is void. Article 13(2) prohibits the State from making any law that takes away or abridges the Fundamental Rights, and the word law in Article 13(3) includes an Ordinance. Since Parliament itself cannot abridge a Fundamental Right by ordinary legislation, the President cannot achieve it by Ordinance either. The ordinance-making power is co-extensive with the legislative power of Parliament, and therefore inherits its limits as well as its reach.
• Statements I and III hold, giving (c).
• Options (a), (b) and (d) each retain the Fundamental Rights claim.

• Statement I is correct. Article 163(1) requires the Governor to act on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers except in so far as he is required by or under the Constitution to exercise his functions in his discretion, and Article 163(2) makes the Governor's own decision final on whether a matter falls within that discretion. Specific instances appear elsewhere, including Article 371A for Nagaland concerning law and order, Article 371C for the Hill Areas of Manipur and provisions relating to Assam, Meghalaya, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, apart from the discretion recognised under Article 200 in reserving a bill. The contrast with the President is instructive, since the Constitution contains no comparable discretionary provision for the President.
• Statement II is incorrect. Under Article 200 the route by which a State bill reaches the President is exclusively through the Governor, who may assent, withhold assent, return a non-money bill for reconsideration, or reserve it for the consideration of the President. The President has no independent power to reach out and call up a State bill on his or her own motion; the President's role under Article 201 arises only once a bill has been reserved. Only I holds, giving (a).
• Options (b), (c) and (d) each misstate one of the two positions.

• Statement I is incorrect. Declaration as a Scheduled Area does not displace the State Government, which retains its executive power. What the Fifth Schedule adds is a layer of protective supervision: the Governor acquires a special responsibility, may by public notification direct that a particular law of Parliament or the State Legislature shall not apply or shall apply with modifications, and may make regulations for peace and good government, including regulating the transfer of land by Scheduled Tribes and the business of money lending. A Tribes Advisory Council is constituted to advise on tribal welfare. At no point does a local body assume total administration.
• Statement II is also incorrect. Paragraph 3 of the Fifth Schedule requires the Governor to report annually, or whenever required by the President, on the administration of the Scheduled Areas, and provides that the executive power of the Union extends to giving directions to the State as to their administration. Giving directions is not the same as taking over administration, and the Schedule contains no provision for a Union takeover on the Governor's recommendation. The Union's power under Article 356 is a distinct and general provision, not a Fifth Schedule mechanism. Neither statement holds, giving (d).
• Options (a), (b) and (c) each accept a displacement of the State that the Schedule does not effect.

The proviso to Article 368(2) lists the entrenched provisions requiring ratification by the legislatures of not less than one-half of the States, in addition to the special majority in Parliament. The list covers the election of the President under Articles 54 and 55; the extent of the executive power of the Union under Article 73 and of a State under Article 162; the Union judiciary, the High Courts in the States and the High Courts for Union Territories; the distribution of legislative powers between the Union and the States; any of the Lists in the Seventh Schedule; the representation of States in Parliament; and Article 368 itself.

• Statement I therefore qualifies, since the Union List is one of the Lists in the Seventh Schedule.
• Statement II qualifies, since the extent of the executive power of a State under Article 162 is expressly named.
• Statement III does not qualify: the conditions of the Governor's office fall under Article 158, which is not among the entrenched provisions and can be amended by special majority in Parliament alone. The unifying logic is that ratification is required only where an amendment would disturb the federal structure, and the terms of the Governor's office, being an office of a single State filled by the Union, does not go to the federal distribution of power. The answer is (a).
• Options (b), (c) and (d) each require Article 158 to be entrenched.

• Statement I is correct and reproduces Article 361(1), under which the President and the Governor of a State are not answerable to any court for the exercise and performance of the powers and duties of their office or for any act done in that exercise. The immunity attaches to the office, and the settled position is that it does not bar judicial review of the official act itself, only personal answerability of the holder.
• Statement II is correct and reproduces Article 361(2), which provides that no criminal proceedings whatsoever shall be instituted or continued against the President or the Governor during the term of office. The protection is absolute for the duration of the term but does not extinguish liability once the term ends.
• Statement III is correct and reflects Article 194(2), the State counterpart of Article 105(2), under which no member of the legislature of a State is liable to any proceedings in any court in respect of anything said or any vote given by that member in the Legislature or any committee of it. This is the privilege of freedom of speech in the House, without which legislators could not debate freely. All three hold, giving (d).
• Options (a), (b) and (c) each discard one accurate statement, and none of the three contains an error justifying exclusion.

The Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board was established under the PNGRB Act, 2006, and its jurisdiction is defined by a clean upstream and downstream divide. The Board regulates the refining, processing, storage, transportation, distribution, marketing and sale of petroleum, petroleum products and natural gas, which are the midstream and downstream segments. The Act expressly excludes the production of crude oil and natural gas from its remit, since exploration and production are governed by the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons and the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas under the licensing and production sharing framework. Applying that divide, activity II is regulated and activity III is regulated, while activity I and activity IV both fall on the excluded upstream side. Two activities therefore qualify, giving (b).

• Option (a) understates by dropping one of the two downstream activities.
• Options (c) and (d) each pull at least one production activity into the Board's jurisdiction, which the Act specifically carves out. The rationale for the exclusion is that upstream production is governed by contractual licensing terms rather than by tariff and access regulation, which is what an economic regulator of this kind exists to do.

• Statement I is correct. Revenue deficit is the excess of revenue expenditure over revenue receipts, so eighty thousand minus sixty thousand gives twenty thousand crores. Conceptually it measures the extent to which the government is borrowing to meet consumption expenditure that creates no asset.
• Statement II is correct. Fiscal deficit is the excess of total expenditure over total receipts excluding borrowings, and by construction it equals the total borrowing requirement of the government. The budget here shows borrowings of ten thousand crores, so the fiscal deficit is ten thousand crores. This identity, that fiscal deficit equals borrowings, is what allows the figure to be read directly rather than computed.
• Statement III is correct. Primary deficit is fiscal deficit less interest payments, so ten thousand minus six thousand gives four thousand crores. It isolates the current year's fiscal imbalance by stripping out the servicing burden inherited from past borrowing, and is therefore the better measure of present fiscal discipline. All three hold, giving (d).
• Options (a), (b) and (c) each discard one correct computation. A candidate who recalls the identity linking fiscal deficit to borrowings can complete the entire question in two subtractions.

The International North-South Transport Corridor was established by an agreement of 2000 between India, Iran and Russia, later joined by other States, and is a multimodal ship, rail and road route running roughly seven thousand two hundred kilometres. Cargo moves from Indian ports across the Arabian Sea to the Iranian ports of Bandar Abbas and Chabahar, then overland through Iran, and onward to Russia, Central Asia and Europe through routes running west of the Caspian through Azerbaijan, east of the Caspian through Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, and directly across the Caspian Sea. Its strategic value to India is that it bypasses Pakistan, which denies overland transit, and substantially cuts the time and cost of the Suez route.

• Option (a) captures this and is the answer.
• Option (b) is wrong because the corridor deliberately avoids China, and Chinese connectivity to Central Asia belongs to the Belt and Road Initiative, a separate and competing framework.
• Option (c) describes India's eastward connectivity, which is the domain of the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project and the India Myanmar Thailand Trilateral Highway.
• Option (d) names a genuine transit country on the western branch but omits Iran, the indispensable gateway, and omits Central Asia.

• Statement I is incorrect, and the ranking is the reverse of what is asserted. The United States is the world's largest producer of fuel ethanol, accounting for roughly half of global output, with Brazil second at somewhere near a quarter to a third. Brazil has the longer history, having built its Proalcool programme after the oil shocks of the nineteen seventies and pioneered flex fuel vehicles, and this priority in time is very likely the source of the mistaken belief that it leads in volume.
• Statement II is correct. The United States relies overwhelmingly on corn, converting starch to fermentable sugars through enzymatic hydrolysis, whereas Brazil uses sugarcane, whose sucrose is directly fermentable and whose bagasse can be burnt to power the mill, giving the Brazilian route a considerably better energy balance and lower cost per litre. Since I fails and II holds, the answer is (d).
• Options (a) and (b) both require the production ranking to be correct.
• Option (c) inverts the position entirely, accepting the false ranking while rejecting the well-established feedstock difference.

The wet-bulb temperature is the lowest temperature to which air can be cooled by evaporating water into it, so it combines heat and humidity in a single measure.

• Statement II follows directly from the physics and is correct. The human body sheds metabolic heat mainly by evaporating sweat from the skin, and that evaporation depends on a gradient between skin and air. Once the wet-bulb temperature approaches skin temperature, around thirty five degrees Celsius, the gradient vanishes, sweat no longer evaporates effectively, and core temperature rises regardless of shade, rest or water intake. This is why thirty five degrees wet-bulb is described as a survivability threshold rather than merely a discomfort threshold, and it applies to other mammals for the same reason.
• Statement I is treated as correct by the key, on the broader reading that the report addresses India's climate vulnerability as a whole, within which peninsular India faces compounding exposure to flooding, tropical cyclones and drought. Both are accepted, giving (c).
• Option (b) alone would be the answer on a strict reading confined to wet-bulb effects, option (a) discards the direct physiological implication, and option (d) rejects both.

Gross primary deficit is defined as fiscal deficit less interest payments, so the computation is fifty thousand minus one thousand five hundred, giving forty eight thousand five hundred crores, which is option (a). The figure of ten thousand crores of non-debt creating capital receipts is a deliberate distractor and must not be used. Non-debt creating capital receipts, such as disinvestment proceeds and recovery of loans, are already netted off in arriving at the fiscal deficit, since fiscal deficit is total expenditure minus total receipts other than borrowings. Subtracting them a second time would double count.

• Option (b) results from adding the interest liabilities instead of subtracting them, reversing the sign of the adjustment.
• Option (c) results from adding the non-debt receipts to the fiscal deficit and then subtracting interest, compounding two errors.
• Option (d) would apply only if none of the computations were valid. The conceptual point behind the definition is that primary deficit strips out the cost of servicing past debt so as to isolate the current fiscal stance, and a country can run a fiscal deficit while having a primary surplus if its entire borrowing is attributable to inherited interest obligations.

• Statement II is incorrect and is the single decisive elimination. The Fifteenth Finance Commission recommended that forty one per cent of the net proceeds of Union taxes be devolved to the States, not forty five per cent. The figure of forty one represents a one percentage point reduction from the forty two recommended by the Fourteenth Finance Commission, the reduction being made to provide for the newly formed Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, which are financed by the Centre. Since Statement II fails, every option containing it must fall, which removes (a), (b) and (d) at once and leaves (c).
• Statement I is correct: performance-based grants of four thousand eight hundred crores across 2022-23 to 2025-26 were recommended to incentivise States to improve educational outcomes.
• Statement III is correct: forty five thousand crores were recommended as a performance-based incentive available to all States for undertaking agricultural reforms, covering areas such as land leasing, agricultural exports and water use efficiency.
• Statement IV is correct: the Commission reintroduced tax effort as a criterion in the horizontal devolution formula, with a weight of two and a half per cent, to reward States that mobilise their own revenue efficiently. The answer is (c).

• Statement I is correct: the IBRD lends to middle income countries and to creditworthy low income governments, raising funds on international capital markets against its callable capital and passing on near-market terms. The complementary institution is the International Development Association, which provides concessional credits and grants to the poorest countries, and the two together constitute what is commonly called the World Bank.
• Statement III is correct: the IBRD was established at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 and began operations in 1946, its original purpose being the reconstruction of war-devastated Europe, with its first loan made to France. Its focus shifted towards development lending as the Marshall Plan took over the reconstruction task, and the reconstruction in its name is a historical remnant.
• Statement II is incorrect, and the word single-handedly is the giveaway. The IBRD operates within the World Bank Group alongside IDA, the International Finance Corporation, the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency and ICSID, and works in cooperation with the IMF, regional development banks and bilateral donors.
• Statements I and III hold, giving (c).
• Options (a), (b) and (d) each retain the exclusivity claim, which absolute qualifiers of this kind rarely survive.

• Statement I is correct and captures the defining difference between the two systems. RTGS stands for Real Time Gross Settlement, in which each instruction is settled individually and continuously as it is received, without netting against other transactions, which is why it is reserved for large value transfers with a minimum threshold of two lakh rupees. NEFT operates on a deferred net settlement basis, batching instructions and settling them in half-hourly cycles, so a lag is inherent to its design.
• Statement II is incorrect: the Reserve Bank has directed that no charges be levied on inward transactions in RTGS, and the same applies to NEFT, so there is no asymmetry of the kind asserted. Charges, where they arise, fall on outward transactions.
• Statement III is incorrect on both limbs, since both systems now operate round the clock on all days of the year. NEFT became available on a twenty four by seven basis in December 2019 and RTGS followed in December 2020, making India one of the few countries with continuous availability of both large value and retail electronic settlement. Only I holds, giving (a).
• Options (b), (c) and (d) each retain a statement that the extension of operating hours has rendered obsolete.

• Statement I is correct: the scheme, launched in February 2024 and implemented by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, targets the installation of rooftop solar systems in one crore residential households, supported by central financial assistance graded by system capacity and by collateral-free concessional loans, with households receiving free electricity up to a specified monthly consumption and able to sell surplus power to the distribution company.
• Statement II is correct: the scheme provides for training at grassroots level in installation, operation, maintenance and repair of rooftop solar systems, which addresses the practical constraint that a dispersed residential rollout of this scale needs a distributed technician base rather than a few large contractors.
• Statement III is correct: the capacity building component envisages the creation of more than three lakh skilled personnel through fresh skilling and upskilling, with a substantial share as certified solar photovoltaic technicians. All three hold, giving (d).
• Options (a), (b) and (c) each drop one accurate component. The design point worth noting is that the scheme couples a demand-side subsidy with a supply-side skilling programme, since installation capacity rather than panel availability is usually the binding constraint on rooftop deployment.

The statement belongs to the Dandi march of 1930, made as Gandhi prepared to break the salt law publicly on the sixth of April after the twenty four day march from Sabarmati, giving (b). The remark is characteristic of his method at that moment: the deliberate and announced breach of a law, accompanied by an open declaration of the intention to breach it, so that the act carried no concealment and invited the legal consequence. Making sedition a matter of religion asserted that obedience to conscience overrode obedience to an unjust statute, while the accompanying insistence that the battle remained non-violent kept the challenge within the satyagraha frame.

• Option (a) is wrong because Champaran in 1917 was a localised agrarian inquiry into indigo cultivation conducted largely through negotiation and evidence gathering, not open law breaking of this kind.
• Option (c) is wrong because the Second Round Table Conference in 1931 was a negotiation in London where Gandhi attended as sole Congress representative, an entirely different register.
• Option (d) is wrong because the Quit India launch in 1942 is associated with the call to do or die. This is a pure recall question with no elimination route, since all four options are plausible occasions for a defiant statement.

The Dancing Girl is a bronze figurine about ten centimetres high, excavated at Mohenjo-daro in 1926 and now in the National Museum in New Delhi, giving (c). Its importance lies in the technique as much as the subject: it was cast by the lost wax or cire perdue method, in which a wax model is coated in clay, the wax melted out and molten metal poured into the cavity, demonstrating that Harappan metallurgy had mastered a sophisticated casting process. The figure stands in a relaxed posture with one arm heavily bangled, and is valued for conveying naturalism and movement at a very small scale.

• Option (a), carnelian, is wrong as the material of this piece, though it is closely associated with the Harappans, who made long barrel carnelian beads that travelled as far as Mesopotamia and are among the best evidence of that trade.
• Option (b), clay, is wrong here although terracotta figurines including the mother goddess figures are abundant at Harappan sites.
• Option (d), gold, is wrong; Harappan gold survives as jewellery and ornaments rather than figurative sculpture. A related item to keep distinct is the steatite bearded priest king from the same site.

Madan Mohan Malaviya led the legal defence of those arrested after the Chauri Chaura incident of February 1922, in which a crowd set fire to a police station in Gorakhpur district killing policemen inside, prompting Gandhi to suspend the Non-Cooperation Movement. The sessions court sentenced a very large number of the accused to death, and the appellate intervention, in which Malaviya was central, secured acquittals for many and reduced the death sentences to a small fraction of the original number. The key names Krishna Kant alongside him, giving (b).

• Option (a), C. R. Das, was a leading barrister who had defended Aurobindo Ghose in the Alipore Bomb Case and was at this time opposed to the suspension of the movement, but he is not associated with this defence.
• Option (c) pairs Saifuddin Kitchlew, associated with the Rowlatt agitation in Punjab and the events preceding Jallianwala Bagh, with Khwaja Hasan Nizami, a Sufi writer, neither being connected to Chauri Chaura.
• Option (d), Jinnah, had resigned from the Congress in 1920 in opposition to the non-cooperation programme itself, so his appearance for its participants would be incongruous.

The Poona Pact of September 1932 is the correct antecedent, giving (a). Its background was the Communal Award of August 1932, which granted separate electorates to the Depressed Classes. Gandhi, then imprisoned in Yerwada, began a fast unto death against the provision, holding that separate electorates would permanently divide Hindu society, while Ambedkar defended them as the only guarantee of genuine political representation. The compromise reached replaced separate electorates with reserved seats within joint electorates, and the number of reserved seats was substantially increased over what the Award had provided. Its consequence for Gandhi's own programme was immediate and is what the question tests: he made the removal of untouchability a central plank of constructive work, founding the Harijan Sevak Sangh in 1932 and launching the weekly Harijan in 1933, and undertaking an extensive Harijan tour.

• Option (b), the Gandhi-Irwin Agreement of March 1931, concerned the suspension of Civil Disobedience and participation in the Round Table Conference.
• Option (c) relates to 1942, a decade later.
• Option (d), the Government of India Act of 1935, gave legislative form to some of these arrangements but followed rather than prompted the shift.

The two places sit on opposite sides of the International Date Line, which runs roughly along the one hundred and eightieth meridian through the Bering Strait, deviating to keep territories whole.

• Statement I is correct: despite their proximity across the strait, Anadyr on the Russian side and Nome on the Alaskan side lie in different calendar days, since crossing the Date Line changes the date by one day irrespective of the small difference in longitude. This is the standard illustration of the Date Line's effect.
• Statement II is incorrect, and it reverses the direction. Anadyr lies west of the Date Line on the Asian side and is therefore ahead in date, at about UTC plus twelve, while Nome lies east of it on the American side and is behind, at about UTC minus nine. So when it is Monday in Anadyr it is Sunday in Nome, not Tuesday. The reliable rule is that travelling westward across the Date Line advances the date and travelling eastward sets it back, so the Asian side is always the later date. Only I holds, giving (a).
• Options (b) and (c) accept the reversed direction, and option (d) denies the date change altogether.

E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker, known as Periyar, founded the Self-Respect Movement in Tamil Nadu in 1925 after leaving the Congress over its handling of caste, particularly the Vaikom episode and the question of communal representation. The movement was rationalist and anti-Brahmanical in character, rejecting caste hierarchy, priestly mediation and the ritual authority of scripture, and it institutionalised this in practice through self-respect marriages conducted without Brahmin priests or Vedic rites, which Tamil Nadu later gave legal recognition. It also campaigned for women's rights including widow remarriage and against child marriage, and it fed into the Dravidian political movement through the Dravidar Kazhagam. This gives (a).

• Option (b), Ambedkar, led the parallel and equally radical anti-caste struggle in western India through the Mahad Satyagraha, the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha and later the Constituent Assembly, but he did not found this movement.
• Options (c) and (d), Bhaskarrao Jadhav and Dinkarrao Javalkar, were figures of the non-Brahmin and Satyashodhak tradition in Maharashtra, which makes them plausible distractors, but the Self-Respect Movement is distinctly Periyar's.

• Statement I is correct: rare earth elements are essential to display manufacture, with europium providing red emission, terbium green, and yttrium serving as the host lattice in many phosphor compositions, alongside cerium and gadolinium in related applications.
• Statement II is correct: several lanthanides are strongly luminescent, and Statement II supplies the reason for Statement I, so the explanatory link holds and the answer is (a). The physical basis is worth stating precisely. Emission in the lanthanides arises from transitions between four f orbitals, which lie inside the filled five s and five p shells and are therefore shielded from the surrounding crystal field. Two consequences follow: the emission occurs at sharply defined wavelengths largely independent of the host material, which gives displays their colour purity, and the transitions are formally forbidden by the Laporte selection rule, which makes them slow and the excited states long-lived.
• Options (c) and (d) each reject one accurate statement.
• Option (b) concedes both but denies the causal connection, which cannot stand, since the luminescent property is precisely why these elements are chosen for screens.

The stem asks which statements are not correct, so the reasoning must be inverted before matching to the options.

• Statement I is not correct: the National Rail Plan sets its horizon at 2030, not 2028, with a stated aim of creating a future ready railway system and raising the rail share of freight modal traffic.
• Statement II is not correct: Kavach was developed indigenously by the Research Designs and Standards Organisation together with Indian firms, and is presented as a Made in India train protection system, so the attribution to German collaboration is wrong.
• Statement III is in fact correct, and therefore does not belong in the answer: Kavach uses RFID tags fixed to the track in station sections and at signals, which the locomotive reader uses to establish position, working alongside radio communication between the loco unit, the stationary unit and other locomotives to enforce automatic braking when a signal is passed at danger or a speed restriction is exceeded. The statements that are not correct are I and II, giving (a).
• Option (d) wrongly rejects the accurate RFID description, and options (b) and (c) each mix one accurate statement into the set of incorrect ones.

• Statement I is correct. Although Article 72 confers the power in wide terms, the Supreme Court has held that its exercise is not wholly beyond scrutiny. In Kehar Singh the Court held that it would not examine the merits of the decision but could examine whether the power had been exercised at all and on relevant considerations, and in Epuru Sudhakar it set aside a grant of remission, holding that the order could be reviewed where it was arbitrary, mala fide, passed without application of mind or on wholly irrelevant grounds. The review is therefore limited rather than absent, which is exactly what the statement claims.
• Statement II is incorrect. Article 72 is a power of the President exercised on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers under Article 74, and the settled position from Maru Ram onwards is that the President acts on the advice of the government of the day and not on personal satisfaction. In practice the Ministry of Home Affairs processes mercy petitions and tenders advice. Only I holds, giving (a).
• Options (b) and (c) both attribute an independent discretion to the President that the Constitution does not confer, and option (d) wrongly denies the availability of limited review.

• Statement I is correct and reproduces the proviso to Article 94, under which the Speaker does not vacate office on dissolution but continues until immediately before the first sitting of the newly constituted House. The purpose is continuity of the office, so that the House is never without a Speaker and someone remains competent to discharge essential functions in the interval.
• Statement III is correct and reproduces Article 94(c) read with the fourteen days' notice requirement: removal is by a resolution passed by a majority of all the then members of the House, an effective majority rather than a simple majority of those present and voting, and while such a resolution is under consideration the Speaker may sit in the House but not preside, and does not have a casting vote though he or she may vote in the first instance.
• Statement II is incorrect. There is no constitutional requirement that a Speaker resign from the political party on election. The convention of severing party ties exists in the United Kingdom but was not written into the Indian Constitution, and Indian Speakers have generally retained party membership.
• Statements I and III hold, giving (c).
• Options (a), (b) and (d) each import the British convention as an Indian constitutional provision.

• Statement I is incorrect because it confuses two distinct disqualification routes. For disqualifications under Article 102(1), covering office of profit, unsoundness of mind, insolvency and the like, the question is referred to the President, whose decision is final and is taken in accordance with the opinion of the Election Commission under Article 103. For disqualification on the ground of defection under the Tenth Schedule, paragraph 6 vests the decision in the Chairman or the Speaker of the House concerned, not in the President, and the President has no role. The statement also wrongly substitutes the opinion of the Council of Ministers for that of the Election Commission, compounding the error.
• Statement II is incorrect and is the easier of the two to reject. The Tenth Schedule, inserted by the Fifty-second Amendment in 1985, is built entirely around the concept of the political party, using the expressions original political party and legislature party throughout, and Article 102(2) and Article 191(2) refer to it as well. The Constitution as originally enacted did not use the term, which is likely the source of the confusion, but the Tenth Schedule introduced it. Neither statement holds, giving (d).
• Options (a), (b) and (c) each retain one of the two errors.

The Mines and Minerals Development and Regulation Act, 1957 divides authority over minor minerals in a way that Statement I gets exactly backwards. Section 15 empowers State Governments to make rules for regulating the grant of quarry leases, mining leases and other mineral concessions in respect of minor minerals, and for purposes connected with them, including the fixing of royalty rates within prescribed ceilings. Minor mineral administration is therefore substantially a State subject in practice, which is why sand mining regulation, and the disputes it generates, operate at the State level.

• Statement I is accordingly incorrect.
• Statement II is correct. Section 3(e) defines minor minerals as building stones, gravel, ordinary clay, ordinary sand other than sand used for prescribed purposes, and limestone used for kiln burning, together with any other mineral that the Central Government may by notification declare to be a minor mineral. The power to expand the category thus rests with the Centre while the power to regulate concessions within it rests with the States. Since I fails and II holds, the answer is (d).
• Options (a) and (b) require Statement I to be correct.
• Option (c) inverts the position entirely.

The European Union adopted the Nature Restoration Law in 2024 as part of the European Green Deal and the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, giving (a). Its significance is that it moves beyond protecting what remains to requiring active restoration of degraded ecosystems, setting binding targets for member States to bring restoration measures to a substantial share of degraded habitats by 2030 and to all such areas by 2050, covering wetlands, forests, rivers, marine habitats, urban green space and pollinator populations. The elimination logic rests on the word enacted, which implies a body with legislative authority binding on its members. The European Union is the only option that can legislate in that sense.

• Option (b), the World Bank, is a lending institution that finances projects and can attach conditions to loans, but it does not enact law.
• Option (c), the OECD, is a forum for policy analysis and recommendation among member economies, with no legislative competence.
• Option (d), the Food and Agriculture Organization, is a United Nations specialised agency that sets standards and provides technical assistance but cannot enact binding law over States. A candidate who reasons from the nature of legislative power alone can reach (a) without recalling the instrument.

The stem asks which statements are not correct, and all three fail.

• Statement I is not correct: Article 243B provides for panchayats at the village, intermediate and district levels, but expressly exempts States having a population not exceeding twenty lakhs from constituting panchayats at the intermediate level, so smaller States such as Goa, Sikkim and Mizoram may operate a two tier structure.
• Statement II is not correct: Article 243F sets the minimum age for membership of a panchayat at twenty one years, not thirty. The figure of thirty is associated with membership of a State Legislative Council or the Council of States, and its appearance here is the intended confusion.
• Statement III is not correct: Article 243I requires the Governor of a State, not the Chief Minister, to constitute a Finance Commission at the expiry of every fifth year to review the financial position of the panchayats and make recommendations on the distribution of the net proceeds of taxes and duties leviable by the State. The office named is the error, since the substance of the function is accurately described. All three are incorrect, giving (d).
• Options (a), (b) and (c) each treat one of the three as accurate.

• Statement I is correct: BIMSTEC comprises seven member States, namely Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand, and this had remained the composition through January 2025.
• Statement II is incorrect: the grouping came into existence with the Bangkok Declaration of June 1997, not a Dhaka Declaration of 1999. Dhaka is a plausible distractor because it hosts the BIMSTEC Secretariat, established there in 2014.
• Statement III is incorrect: the founding members in 1997 were Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand, which is why the grouping was initially styled BIST-EC. Myanmar joined later in 1997 and Nepal and Bhutan only in 2004, so Nepal is not a founding member and its inclusion in the list is the error.
• Statement IV is incorrect: under the reorganised structure of seven pillars each led by one member, India leads Security, while tourism falls within people to people contact, led by Nepal. Bangladesh leads trade and investment, Bhutan environment and climate change, Myanmar agriculture and food security, Sri Lanka science, technology and innovation, and Thailand connectivity. Only I holds, giving (d).
• Options (a), (b) and (c) each retain one of the three errors.

The Gandhi Peace Prize was instituted in 1995 to mark the one hundred and twenty fifth birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, and is conferred annually by the Government of India through the Ministry of Culture for contributions towards social, economic and political transformation through non-violence. The selection jury is chaired by the Prime Minister and includes the Chief Justice of India and the Leader of the single largest opposition party in the Lok Sabha, along with an eminent person nominated to the jury. The President of India is not a member, which is the discriminating fact, and the underlying logic is that the President confers honours rather than selecting recipients, a separation maintained across national awards so that the head of State is not placed in the position of choosing those he or she will honour. The answer is therefore (c).

• Options (b) and (d) both include the President and fail on that ground.
• Option (a) omits the Chief Justice of India, whose presence on the jury follows the standard pattern for high national selection committees, which draw on the heads of the executive, the judiciary and the parliamentary opposition to lend the choice cross-institutional legitimacy.

GAGAN is a satellite based augmentation system developed jointly by ISRO and the Airports Authority of India, which uses a network of reference stations to measure errors in the GPS signal arising from ionospheric delay, satellite clock drift and orbital uncertainty, computes corrections at a central facility, and broadcasts them through geostationary satellites.

• Statement I is correct: the system improves both accuracy, by correcting these errors, and integrity, by warning users promptly when the signal should not be trusted, and integrity is the more critical property for aviation since a wrong position believed to be right is far more dangerous than a known loss of service.
• Statement II is correct: reliable satellite based approach guidance permits more direct routing, reduced separation and precision approaches at airfields lacking ground based instrument landing systems, which improves the uniformity and quality of air traffic management.
• Statement III is incorrect, and it is the intended trap. The corrected signal is available to any receiver in the coverage area, and applications extend to railways, maritime navigation, road transport, precision agriculture, surveying and disaster management.
• Statements I and II hold, giving (d).
• Options (a) and (b) retain the exclusivity claim, and option (c) discards the air traffic benefit.

• Statement I is correct: the AI Action Summit was held at the Grand Palais in Paris in February 2025, co-chaired by France and India, and it was the third in the sequence that began with the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in November 2023 and continued with the Seoul Summit in May 2024. The shift of vocabulary across the three, from safety at Bletchley to action at Paris, reflects a widening of the agenda from catastrophic risk towards access, development and public interest applications, which is the context in which India's co-chairing is significant.
• Statement II is incorrect and is the decisive point: the United States and the United Kingdom declined to sign the declaration on inclusive and sustainable artificial intelligence, while some sixty other participants endorsed it. The reported reasons differed, with concerns expressed about the effect of the framing on innovation and about national security language, but the fact of non-signature by both was widely reported at the time. Only I holds, giving (a).
• Options (b) and (c) accept the signature that did not occur, and option (d) wrongly rejects the accurate account of the summit lineage and co-chairing.

• Statement I is correct: the sixteenth BRICS Summit was held at Kazan in the Republic of Tatarstan in October 2024 under the Russian chairship, and was the first summit following the expansion of the grouping.
• Statement II is correct: Indonesia became a full member in January 2025, joining the enlarged membership that had already taken in Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, and its accession is significant as the first Southeast Asian member and the largest economy of that region.
• Statement III is incorrect, and the error turns on a single word. The theme was Strengthening Multilateralism for Just Global Development and Security, not multiculturalism. The substitution matters because multilateralism is the substantive claim BRICS makes, that global governance should not rest with a narrow set of institutions and currencies, whereas multiculturalism would describe a social policy orientation with no bearing on the grouping's agenda.
• Statements I and II hold, giving (a).
• Options (b) and (c) retain the misworded theme, and option (d) discards Indonesia's accession. A candidate alert to the difference between the two words could resolve this without recalling the theme exactly.

• Statement III is correct and is the only one that survives: the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013 provides that the Chairperson or a Member shall not be less than forty five years of age on the date of assuming office.
• Statement I is incorrect: the Act extends to public servants in and outside India, so Indian public servants posted abroad are covered, and the Act also applies to Indian citizens outside India in respect of offences under it.
• Statement II is incorrect in its second limb: while the disqualification relating to membership of Parliament or a State or Union Territory legislature is accurate, the Chairperson need not be the Chief Justice of India. The Act permits the Chairperson to be a former Chief Justice of India, a former Judge of the Supreme Court, or an eminent person of impeccable integrity and outstanding ability with specified expertise, so the word only makes the statement false.
• Statement IV is incorrect: the Act expressly permits inquiry into allegations against a sitting Prime Minister, subject to safeguards. Matters relating to international relations, external and internal security, public order, atomic energy and space are excluded, the inquiry must be held in camera, and it requires approval of a Full Bench with at least two thirds of members concurring. Only III holds, giving (a).

• Statement I is correct: the inaugural Kho Kho World Cup was held in New Delhi in January 2025, at the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium, with teams from several countries competing in men's and women's categories, and India won both titles by defeating Nepal in each final.
• Statements II and III are incorrect, and the error is a deliberate transposition rather than an invention: the two winning margins given are genuine, but they have been exchanged between the categories. The men's final was won by the narrower of the two margins and the women's by the wider, so attaching the larger score to the men's result and the smaller to the women's reverses the actual outcomes. Since the country, the opponent and the result are all correctly stated in both, the statements can only be rejected by recalling which score belonged to which final, which makes this an unusually unforgiving item. Only I holds, giving (a).
• Option (d) accepts both transposed scores, and options (b) and (c) each accept one. A candidate who knew that India won both titles but not the exact scorelines had no reliable route to the answer, and would most likely have marked (d).

• Statement I is incorrect and conflates two distinct events of 2024. The forty fifth Chess Olympiad was held at Budapest in September 2024 and is a team competition, in which India won gold in both the open and the women's sections, with Gukesh taking an individual board medal. It has no final in which one player defeats another. Gukesh became the youngest undisputed World Chess Champion at the World Chess Championship held at Singapore in December 2024, and his opponent there was Ding Liren of China, not Ian Nepomniachtchi. The statement therefore misnames the event and the opponent, either of which alone defeats it. Nepomniachtchi is a plausible distractor because he contested the two preceding championship matches against Magnus Carlsen and Ding Liren.
• Statement II is correct: Abhimanyu Mishra of the United States earned the Grandmaster title in 2021 at the age of twelve years and four months, breaking the record previously held by Sergey Karjakin, and it stands as the youngest ever. Only II holds, giving (b).
• Options (a) and (c) accept the conflated account, and option (d) discards the accurate record.