General Knowledge and Current Affairs
What this domain tests
This section checks two layers of knowledge. Static GK covers the Constitution, national symbols, awards, sports, science and the headquarters of organisations. Current affairs covers roughly the past 12–18 months, and setters consistently favour items with a women-and-child or Madhya Pradesh link: new schemes, appointments, summits, and state-level initiatives.
Core rules to apply
- Learn every scheme as a four-part card: launch year, nodal ministry, beneficiary, benefit amount. Most wrong options are built by swapping one of those four.
- For "first / who" questions, fix the office first, then the person holding it on the reference date.
- Anchor dates to a few big years - 1950 (Constitution), 1992 (73rd–74th Amendments), 2015 (BBBP, SDGs) - and reason outward instead of memorising lists.
- For headquarters, group agencies by city: New York (UN Secretariat, UNICEF), Geneva (WHO, ILO), Rome (FAO), Paris (UNESCO), Vienna (IAEA).
Worked example. Beti Bachao Beti Padhao belongs to which ministry? Options: Health and Family Welfare / Women and Child Development / Education / Home. Reasoning: BBBP was launched on 22 January 2015 from Panipat, as a tri-ministerial effort led by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, with Health and Education as partners. The question asks for the nodal ministry, so the partners are distractors. Answer: Women and Child Development.
Traps that cost marks
- Confusing a scheme's launch year with the year it was renamed or expanded (ICDS 1975 vs Poshan Abhiyaan 2018).
- Mixing similar names: Mission Shakti (women) and Mission Vatsalya (children).
- Choosing a partner ministry when the question asks for the nodal one.