General Knowledge and Current Affairs: Constitutional Anchors and Reading Recent Events
The General Knowledge and Current Affairs domain checks whether you can place Sri Lanka's constitutional, geographic and policy facts accurately, then apply one step of reasoning to a recent event. Questions are factual recall plus institution-and-number precision, not opinion.
Constitutional and geographic anchors
- The 1978 Constitution (as amended) creates an executive President who is Head of State, Head of Government and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.
- Parliament has 225 members: 196 elected by district and 29 from the national list.
- Sri Lanka has 9 provinces and 25 districts. The legislative capital is Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte; Colombo is the commercial capital.
- Official languages are Sinhala and Tamil; English is the link language.
Recent events worth pinning to a date
- Presidential election, 21 September 2024: Anura Kumara Dissanayake (National People's Power) was elected after second-preference transfers, because no candidate passed 50%+1 on first preferences.
- Parliamentary election, 14 November 2024: the NPP won 159 of 225 seats.
- March 2023: the IMF approved a 48-month Extended Fund Facility of about US$2.9 billion; Colombo Consumer Price Index inflation had peaked near 69.8% year-on-year in September 2022.
Worked example
A question states that no candidate crossed 50%+1 of first preferences in 2024 and asks how the winner was found. Reasoning: the Constitution requires a single majority, so the count proceeds to the second and third preferences marked for the two leading candidates and the higher transferred total wins. First-round shares were Dissanayake 42.3%, Premadasa 32.8% and Wickremesinghe 17.3%; transfers took Dissanayake to about 55.9%.
Traps that cost marks
- Saying Parliament has 225 district seats; 29 are national list.
- Naming Colombo as the capital in a constitutional question.
- Quoting inflation or IMF figures without the year, which turns a correct fact into a wrong answer.