General Awareness
General Awareness
CMAT's 20-question general awareness block is unusually business- and economy-heavy for an entrance test: Indian macroeconomics, banking and financial institutions, government schemes, corporate and brand news, and the year's business headlines - alongside static GK (polity, geography, art and culture, science), sports, awards and international affairs. Expect roughly two-thirds economy and current business, one-third static.
Anchors to revise
- Monetary policy: repo (RBI lends to banks against government securities), reverse repo, MSF, CRR (share of net demand and time liabilities held with the RBI, earning no interest), SLR (held by banks in G-secs, gold and cash), bank rate.
- Price and output indices: CPI (MoSPI, retail, the inflation-targeting measure), WPI (Office of the Economic Adviser, DPIIT, excludes services), IIP (industrial production).
- Fiscal terms: revenue versus capital expenditure, fiscal deficit (total expenditure minus non-debt receipts), FRBM targets, Finance Bill versus Appropriation Bill.
- Regulators: SEBI (securities), IRDAI (insurance), PFRDA (pensions), NABARD (rural credit), SIDBI (MSMEs).
Worked example
Ask: is currency in circulation an asset or a liability of the RBI? Reason from the balance sheet - notes issued sit on the liability side, matched by assets such as gold and foreign securities. Holdings of government securities are an asset. So currency in circulation is the liability, not the asset.
Traps
- Mixing fiscal tools (government taxation and spending) with monetary tools (RBI).
- Confusing CRR with SLR, or CPI with WPI.
- Memorising a rate, rank or office-holder without the date; static numbers go stale.
- Superlatives ("first", "largest", "only") are where wrong options are usually planted.