General Knowledge and Current Affairs
This domain rewards breadth with precision. Roughly half the paper is static - Constitution, geography, economy and everyday science - and half is the rolling current-affairs window of the previous year, with a marked Uttarakhand flavour because the post sits inside a state cooperative department.
The static core you cannot skip
- Constitution: Preamble keywords, Parts and Schedules, Fundamental Rights (Articles 12–35), Directive Principles, the 97th Amendment (Part IXB, cooperatives), Governor versus President powers, the 73rd and 74th Amendments.
- Geography: Himalayan ranges and passes, river systems, national parks and biosphere reserves, monsoon mechanism.
- Economy and institutions: RBI functions and instruments, NABARD, budget vocabulary, GST structure.
- Science: nutrition and deficiency diseases, common instruments, basic electricity and optics.
Worked example
'Which amendment gave constitutional status to cooperative societies?' Reason it through: the 97th Amendment (2011, effective 2012) inserted Part IXB, Articles 243ZH–243ZT, made forming a cooperative a fundamental right under Article 19(1)(c), and added Article 43B to the Directive Principles. Answer: the 97th Amendment.
Traps that cost marks
- Confusing neighbouring schemes - PM-KISAN (income support) with the Kisan Credit Card (short-term credit).
- Superlative questions (first, largest, oldest) flip when a new record is set; fix the date the question is framed against.
- Reading current affairs only as headlines; examiners ask the institution behind an event, not the venue.
- Burning attempts on pure guesses where negative marking applies.
Prepare current affairs by theme - appointments, awards, schemes, indices, sports, summits - rather than as a daily news dump, and anchor each item to a static fact you already know.