General Knowledge and Current Affairs
Domain 1 - General Knowledge and Current Affairs
This domain checks breadth plus recency. Roughly half the questions are static (books and authors, awards, sports, national days, organisations, first-in-India facts); the other half come from the twelve months before the exam - appointments, schemes, summits, defence exercises, sports results and obituaries.
Build a static skeleton first
Static GK is finite, so it is the cheapest scoring area. Learn by cluster, not by reading lists:
- Indian polity firsts and father-of tags;
- award–year–field triplets for Bharat Ratna, Padma awards, Jnanpith, Dronacharya and Arjuna;
- headquarters of UN bodies, SAARC, BRICS, SCO and ASEAN;
- national days in calendar order;
- sports: World Cup winners, Olympic medallists, cups and trophies.
Current affairs by category
Keep six running notebooks: appointments, schemes, summits, defence exercises, sports, and science/space. Government releases and a single monthly compilation are enough; do not chase every headline.
Worked example
Question: Who was the first Indian to win an individual Olympic gold medal? Reasoning: India's early hockey golds were team medals. The first individual gold came in shooting - Abhinav Bindra, 10m Air Rifle (Men), Beijing 2008. Answer: Abhinav Bindra, Beijing 2008.
Traps that cost marks
- Confusing the Khel Ratna (now Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna) with the Arjuna Award.
- Mixing the year an award was announced with the year it was conferred.
- Picking an option that was true two years ago - quotas, district counts and scheme names get revised.
- Reading only the stem; the options often differ by one digit or one year.