1. • PRELIMS
• 31 questions.
• 6 starred questions as tiebreakers.
• One word/ one phrase answers.
2. 1
• The two islands you see on the picture are called as Little
Diomede(left) and Big Diomede (right). The story is that
if you stand on Big Diomede and take look at Little
Diomede you can get a glimpse of the past. Likewise if
you stand on Little Diomede and look at Big Diomede you
can get a glimpse of the future. This story is not just a
hearsay or a folktale.
• Where specifically are they located?
3. 2
• It lasts for approximately 24 hours in the presence of
sunlight and is reduced to about 20 hours in artificial light.
• What two-word chronobiological term that derives from
the Greek for 'about a day'?
4. 3
• Which work of art covering 40 acres, by a former
roadworks inspector with PWD, was formally opened to
the public in 1976 after nearly two decades of illegal and
obscured existence ?
5. 4
• It is commonly thought of as a jellyfish but is actually a
colony of polyps and medusoids. It has an air bladder or
sail that allows it to float on the surface of the ocean. It
has no means of propulsion and is pushed by the winds
and the current. It gets its name from its air bladder, which
looks similar to the sails of a fighting ship of the 14th and
15th centuries. Name the creature.
6. 5*
• Depiction of a major event
in the Mahabharata.
• (a) Identify the ritual
• (b) What is its significance?
7. 6
• The man in the picture is also
known as the father of Indian
ornithology, but we know
him better as someone who
was a political reformer and
whose contribution played a
major role in Indian
independence movement.
• Identify.
9. 8*
• X Lake Temple is a temple built in the middle of a lake
in, kasarkode, at around 6 km from Kumble. This is the only
lake temple in Kerala and is believed to be the original seat of
Y. The temple lake is also home to a crocodile named Babiya,
which, local people believe, guards the temple. The lake in
which the Sanctum Sanctorum is built measures about 2 acres.
An interesting spot to keep in mind while visiting the temple
is a cave to the right corner of the lake. According to the local
legend, the deity X chose to go all the way to Z through that
cave. Hence both the places retain similar names, in spite of
being on either end of the region. Give me X or Y.
10. 9
• Name the small village in West Bengal, where a leftist
section of CPI(M) headed by Charu Majumdar and Kanu
Sanyal led a militant peasant uprising in 1967, trying to
develop a "revolutionary opposition" in order to establish
"revolutionary rule" in India.
12. 11
• This scientist, whose eponymous contraption was
immortalized in a Joseph Wright of Derby oil-on-canvas,
described the experiment on an avian thus:
• ..… the Bird for a while appeared lively enough; but upon a
greater Ex suction of the Air, she began manifestly to droop
and appear sick, and very soon after was taken with as violent
and irregular Convulsions, as are wont to be observed in
Poultry, when their heads are wrung off: For the Bird threw
her self over and over two or three times, and dyed with her
Breast upward, her Head downwards, and her Neck awry‖.
Identify the scientist
13.
14. 12*
• Palaeontologist Krill
Yeskov‘s The Last Ringbearer
is an unauthorized sequel to a
popular book series based on
the premise that the original
text needs closer examination
to generate alternate views.
• The book is narrated from the
perspective of the residents of
which land ?
15. 13
• X wrote The Art of Compounding, which was first
published in 1895 and has gone through at least 8 editions.
The book was used as a pharmacological reference up
until the 1960s. X also wrote Extract and Perfumes, which
contained hundreds of formulations. However X is mainly
known for something he devised while he was working in
Parke davis pharmaceutical company. Give me X.
16. 14
• Walking with Lions – Tales from a Diplomatic
Past is a memoir by an author recently much
in the news. Its title refers to the author’s visit
to the court of ruler X, who was known to raise
lions and have them around his palace. In fact,
one of X’s titles was ‘Lion of the Tribe of
Judah’.
• Identify the author and who is X?
17. 15*
• Logo of the national airline of
an Asian country.
• Name
(a) the country
• (b) the airlines.
19. 17
• In Nov 2014, India began celebrating the 125th birth year
of its first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1988, in
tribute to his centenary year, what first began at New
Delhi and ended at Jhansi?
20. 18
• Harvard scientists have built the world's first working Transformer robot,
inspired by the ancient art of X.
• The alien robots that feature in the Transformer movies conceal their true
nature by taking on the form of cars and trucks. The scientists' robot has
yet to reach that level of technical deception and disguises itself – for now,
at least – as a robot that has been flattened.
• Footage from the researchers' laboratory shows a sheet of paper and plastic
mounted with batteries and motors that folds itself into a working machine
without human intervention and then scuttles out of shot.
• The flat-pack robot uses "shape memory polymers" that contract like
muscles when they are heated. The robot takes about four minutes to
assemble from scratch and can walk at a speed of around 5cm per second.
• Give me X.
21. 19
• Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr. was a brigadier general in the
United States Air Force. Tibbets enlisted in the United
States Army in 1937 and qualified as a pilot in 1938. After
the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he flew anti-
submarine patrols over the Atlantic.
• In 1945 he immortalized his mother, _____ ___ Tibbets
by his actions that are remembered even today.
• Name Paul’s mother, and what did he do?
22. 20*
• X was a friend and colleague of the Sanskritist Bohtlingk, who was
preparing the second edition of his book on Y, a famous Indian at about
this time, and X wished to honor Y with including his concepts for
resolving some anomalies in something he has devised.
• X showed his appreciation and debt to the Sanskrit grammarians of ancient
India, who had created sophisticated theories of language based on their
discovery of the two-dimensional patterns in basic sounds.
• A very popular Russian story also says that it was X who came up with the
40% standard strength of vodka in 1894, after having been appointed
Director of the Bureau of Weights and Measures with the assignment to
formulate new state standards for the production of vodka.
• Identify X and Y.
24. 22*
• The largest permanents scale model of X is situated in Y.
The _____ is represented by the Ericsson
globe in stockholm, the largest hemispherical building in
the world. The ______ can also be found in Stockholm
but the _______are situated northward in other cities
along the Baltic sea.
• The system was started by Nils Brenning and Gösta
Gahm and is on the scale of 1:20 million.
• Give X and Y (name of a country)
25. 23
• This logo from Indian
sports was designed to
indicate the four
essential qualities
required by a player
playing the sport:
strength, strategy, speed
and stamina.
• First held in 2014, what
is this the logo of?
27. 25*
• Immediately after the Liaquat–Nehru Pact was
signed in 1950, two ministers resigned from
Nehru’s cabinet. One was Sri KC Neogy.
• Who was the other, who established a new
party within a year?
28. 26
• Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell and William Moerner
won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the
development of super-resolved fluorescence
microscopy (SRFM),” which enables scientists to
observe individual cells and molecules in high
resolution. However, the electron microscope has
been available for decades to observe structures of
comparable size.
• Where does SRFM score over electron
microscopy?
29. 27
• M.K Gandhi and Jyothirao phule were
popularly known as ‘Mahatma’.
• Who was addressed by the masses as
‘Mahamana’ who was also one among the
founders of the scout movement in India?
30. 28
• Identify the Goan
depicted in this statue
outside a street in
panjim, considered as
one among the
pioneers of Hypnotism.
• In which classic was he
depicted almost 50
years after his death in
1819 ?
31. 29
• During the 19th century the area was home to
a British royal artillery armoury, where, in the
early 1890s, Captain Neville Bertie
clay developed a bullet with the jacket cut
away at the tip to reveal its soft lead core
known informally as a ________ or more
correctly as an expanding bullet.
• Which place are we referring to?
32. 30*
• Depicted here is the
state flag of a British
overseas territory
named after
the Umayyad general
Tariq bin ziyad.
• Name it.
33. 31
• X’s idea to offer ________ came to him while "walking from Market
Harborough to Leicester to attend a meeting of the Temperance
Society“. With the opening of the extended Midlands counties railway , he
arranged to take a group of 540 temperance campaigners from Leicester
Campbell railway station to a rally in Loughborough, eleven miles away.
On 5 July 1841, X arranged for the rail company to charge one shilling per
person that included rail tickets and food for this train journey. X was paid
a share of the fares actually charged to the passengers, as the railway
tickets, being legal contracts between company and passenger, could not
have been issued at his own price. This was the first privately chartered
_____ to be advertised to the general public.
• Give me X , considered as the founder of something very common these
days who has a company which avails similar services named after him.
