Places in News

• Option (b) is correct. The Golan Heights is a basalt plateau in the Levant, captured by Israel from Syria in the Six Day War of 1967 and effectively annexed by Israeli law in 1981, an act not recognised internationally. It lies at the junction of Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, commands the Sea of Galilee and its headwaters, and is patrolled by the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, whose position became precarious during the Syrian civil war when armed groups overran parts of the area of separation and detained peacekeepers in 2013 and 2014.
• Options (a), (c) and (d) name regions in which no such place exists. The elimination route is that the name recurs in reporting on Israel and Syria, and even a candidate who cannot place the plateau will associate it with that conflict.

Rajasthan explored the feasibility of an artificial inland port, the concept being to connect a landlocked location to the Arabian Sea by a long navigational channel cut across the low-lying saline tract of the Rann of Kachchh, the attraction being direct maritime access for a State whose trade otherwise moves overland to the Gujarat ports. Hence (d). The distractor structure is worth noting.

• Options (a) and (c), Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, are coastal States and therefore have no need whatever of an artificial inland port connected by a channel, which should exclude them on the logic of the question rather than on recall.
• Option (b), Chhattisgarh, is genuinely landlocked and is the only serious competitor, but it lies far inland across the Deccan interior with no plausible channel alignment, whereas Rajasthan abuts the Rann and the Gulf of Kachchh, which is what made the proposal conceivable at all. The item is difficult because the proposal was reported only briefly and never advanced, but the partial elimination route through coastal geography raises it above pure recall.