General Knowledge and Current Affairs
What to master
General knowledge questions span Nigerian and African geography and institutions, world geography, major international organisations, science basics, sports, and recent national and global events. For current affairs, focus on stable, verifiable facts: who holds a major office, capital cities, currency names, headquarters of organisations, and landmark agreements.
Typical traps
- Outdated office-holders. Answers change with elections and appointments; beware questions written before a transition.
- Near-identical names. Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Equatorial Guinea; Niger (country) and Nigeria; Austria and Australia.
- Organisation headquarters. The UN is in New York, the AU in Addis Ababa, ECOWAS in Abuja, the WTO in Geneva, the ICC in The Hague.
- Currency confusion. The CFA franc serves several West African states; the naira is Nigeria's, the cedi Ghana's, the dalasi The Gambia's.
- Plausible-but-wrong dates. Independence dates and founding years are frequently swapped.
Rule of thumb
For any current-affairs item you cannot verify, eliminate options you know to be false first, then choose the most conservative remaining option - but if two options remain plausible, mark the item for review rather than guessing blindly.
Worked example
"Which city hosts the headquarters of ECOWAS?" Abuja, Nigeria. Anchor it by association: ECOWAS is the West African regional body, and its secretariat has been in Abuja since 2005 (moved from Lomé). Linking an organisation to its region is a reliable memory hook.