NIACL Assistant cheat sheet

Subject-verb agreement: a subject joined by 'and' takes a plural verb, but 'as well as', 'along with', 'besides' leave the verb governed by the first subject only.

Collective nouns (team, committee, jury) take a singular verb when acting as one unit and a plural verb when members act individually.

'Neither...nor' and 'either...or' follow the proximity rule: the verb agrees with the noun nearest to it.

Articles: 'a' before consonant sounds, 'an' before vowel sounds, so 'an hour', 'a university', 'an MBA', 'a one-rupee coin'.

Prepositions after verbs are fixed: 'comply with', 'differ from', 'capable of', 'insist on', 'deprived of', 'averse to'.

Relative pronoun 'who' for persons, 'which' for things, 'that' for defining clauses with persons or things; 'whose' shows possession.

Tenses: 'since' and 'for' with present perfect ('has worked here since 2019'); past perfect for the earlier of two past actions.

Cloze and error-spotting items are solved by testing one grammatical axis at a time: agreement, tense, preposition, article, word order.

Reading comprehension answers must be traceable to a stated line; options that are true in general but absent from the passage are wrong.

In a linear row of n persons, a person at position p from the left is at position (n - p + 1) from the right.

Circular arrangement facing the centre: left is clockwise and right is anticlockwise; when facing outward the directions reverse.

Blood relations: draw a family tree with gender markers and vertical (parent-child) plus horizontal (spouse/sibling) lines before answering.

Coding-decoding: check letter-position shifts (+1, -1, +2), reversal of the word, and vowel/consonant substitution in that order.

Syllogism: 'All A are B' converts to 'Some B are A'; 'No A is B' converts to 'No B is A'; 'Some A are B' converts to 'Some B are A'.

Direction sense: use a compass sketch; facing north turning right gives east, and each right turn rotates 90 degrees clockwise.

Inequalities: 'A > B >= C' gives A > C; combining a '>' chain with a '<' symbol breaks the definite conclusion.

Series completion: test differences, then ratios, then alternating or prime-based patterns, then squares and cubes.

Seating puzzles with 8 or more people are best solved by fixing the most constrained clue first, not the first clue listed.

Percentage change: successive changes of a% and b% give a net change of a + b + ab/100 percent.

Profit and loss: SP = CP x (100 + profit%)/100; when two articles are sold at the same price with equal gain% and loss%, the result is always a loss of (common%/10)^2.

Simple interest = P x R x T / 100; compound interest = P[(1 + R/100)^T - 1], and CI - SI for 2 years = P(R/100)^2.

Speed: distance = speed x time; for equal distances at speeds x and y, average speed = 2xy/(x + y).

Trains: time to cross a pole = length/speed; time to cross a platform = (train length + platform length)/speed.

Boats: downstream speed = boat + stream, upstream = boat - stream; boat speed = (down + up)/2, stream = (down - up)/2.

Time and work: if A does a job in x days and B in y days, together they take xy/(x + y) days.

Pipes and cisterns: a filling pipe is positive and a draining pipe negative; net rate is the algebraic sum of rates.

Permutation and combination: nPr = n!/(n - r)!; nCr = n!/[r!(n - r)!]; probability = favourable outcomes / total outcomes.

IRDAI (Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India) is the statutory regulator for life and general insurance, headquartered in Hyderabad.

Life Insurance Corporation of India was established in 1956 by nationalising private insurers; its initial capital was Rs 5 crore.

General Insurance Corporation of India (GIC Re) is the national reinsurer; the four public general insurers were carved out of GIC in 1972.

Insurance principles: insurable interest, utmost good faith, indemnity, subrogation, contribution and proximate cause.

In life insurance, the sum assured is paid on death or maturity; in general insurance, indemnity restores the insured to the pre-loss financial position.

National financial regulators: RBI for banking and payment systems, SEBI for securities markets, IRDAI for insurance, PFRDA for pensions.

Key monetary tools of RBI include the repo rate, reverse repo, cash reserve ratio, statutory liquidity ratio and open market operations.

Financial inclusion schemes: Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (2014), Pradhan Mantri Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana and Atal Pension Yojana.

Small savings and deposit insurance: DICGC insures bank deposits up to Rs 5 lakh per depositor per bank.

A computer's basic units: input, output, memory (primary and secondary), ALU and control unit, with CPU = ALU + control unit.

Primary memory is volatile RAM (SRAM and DRAM) or non-volatile ROM (PROM, EPROM, EEPROM); secondary storage includes HDD, SSD and optical media.

1 byte = 8 bits; 1 KB = 1024 bytes; 1 MB = 1024 KB; 1 GB = 1024 MB; 1 TB = 1024 GB.

Operating systems manage processes, memory, files and devices; examples are Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and UNIX.

Shortcut keys: Ctrl+C copy, Ctrl+X cut, Ctrl+V paste, Ctrl+Z undo, Ctrl+A select all, Ctrl+S save, Alt+F4 close window.

Internet basics: HTTP/HTTPS for web pages, FTP for file transfer, SMTP for sending mail, POP3/IMAP for receiving mail, DNS resolves names to IP addresses.

Malware types: virus attaches to files, worm self-replicates across networks, Trojan disguises as legitimate software, ransomware encrypts data for payment.

Network devices: hub broadcasts to all ports, switch forwards by MAC address, router forwards by IP address, modem converts digital to analog signals.

MS Office: Excel formulas begin with '=', SUM adds a range, and cell references can be relative (A1), absolute ($A$1) or mixed.