Daily Current Affairs Quiz Prelims Practice 2027
- It empowers the Supreme Court to pass any order necessary for doing "complete justice" in a matter pending before it.
- It was adopted by the Constituent Assembly after extensive debate on its scope.
- In Supreme Court Bar Association v. Union of India (1998), the Court held that Article 142 cannot override an existing statutory scheme.
Statements 1 and 3 are correct. Article 142 lets the Supreme Court pass orders for "complete justice" in a pending matter, and the 1998 Supreme Court Bar Association judgment held that Article 142 can supplement but not supplant an existing statutory scheme. Statement 2 is false, since the provision was actually adopted as Article 118 of the Draft Constitution on 27 May 1949 without debate, making this a classic "plausible institutional process" trap, since it sounds procedurally correct that a major provision would have been extensively debated, but the historical record says otherwise. It is worth never assuming a foundational provision was debated just because it later became consequential, and instead checking the Constituent Assembly record specifically.
AoN is granted by the Defence Acquisition Council as in-principle approval, the first of several stages, AoN, RFP, Trials & Evaluation, Contract Negotiation, then Contract Signing, under the Defence Acquisition Procedure (DAP) 2020. It is not a signed contract, nor a CAG certificate, and options (a), (c), and (d) each describe a later or unrelated stage of procurement, tempting a test-taker who has only a vague sense that AoN "means approval." For multi-stage government processes, it is worth always fixing the exact stage a term refers to, first, middle, or last.
PACT was launched by NITI Aayog at the 5th e-FAST India Summit, as a flagship initiative under the e-FAST India (Electric Freight Accelerator for Sustainable Transport) platform, to aggregate freight demand for zero-emission trucks. It is distinct from FAME, PM E-DRIVE, and the NEMMP, which are separate EV-related schemes or frameworks, and the options list four real, similarly themed government EV initiatives, a "nearby scheme" trap. When several genuine schemes share a policy space, such as electric mobility here, it is worth pinning each new initiative to its specific parent platform rather than the general theme.
BF-BOF, blast furnace-basic oxygen furnace, uses coking coal to smelt iron ore into liquid form in a blast furnace, then converts it to steel in a basic oxygen furnace, making it the most carbon-intensive steelmaking route, remaining dominant in India at 43% of output and globally at 70.4%. Option (a) actually describes the electric arc furnace route and option (d) describes induction furnaces, both lower-emission alternatives, making this a definitional question with three named alternative routes as distractors. When a question asks what a route or process means, it is worth checking that the described mechanism, not just the acronym, matches exactly, since adjacent routes like EAF and induction furnaces are easy to conflate with BF-BOF.
The Falkland Islands, known as Las Malvinas to Argentina, are a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic Ocean. Britain and Argentina fought a war over them in 1982, and islanders voted overwhelmingly to remain British in a 2013 referendum. This is a pure locational-recall question with three plausible but wrong oceans and coastlines as distractors, and for any territorial dispute in the news, it is worth fixing the exact ocean and the two contesting countries on a mental map, since locational traps are common low-hanging Prelims questions.
Under-recovery is the loss oil-marketing companies incur when the price paid by consumers is less than the cost of production and distribution, and it fell from over ₹700 per cylinder in June 2026 to about ₹188 in early August, prompting the recent commercial-LPG price hike aimed at partly offsetting it. The three distractors substitute adjacent but distinct concepts, tax revenue, import shortfall, and pending subsidy, for the actual cost-price gap, so for pricing or subsidy terms it is worth isolating exactly which two figures are being compared, here consumer price versus cost of production, before matching to an option.
- They are explicitly covered under the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act, 2003 (COTPA).
- Nicotine is listed as a scheduled drug under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940.
- A duty-free shop being deemed 'outside India' for Customs Act purposes means no Indian law applies to goods sold there.
All three statements are incorrect. COTPA's definition of tobacco products does not extend to nicotine pouches, nicotine itself is not listed as a scheduled drug, though some nicotine products such as gums and patches are approved for therapeutic use, and being "deemed outside India" for Customs Act purposes, as held in the Flemingo case, does not mean all Indian law is inapplicable to duty-free stores. All three statements individually sound like accurate legal summaries, but the trap is that each one overstates a narrow, specific legal position into a sweeping claim. In law-based statement questions, it is worth watching for words like "explicitly," "listed," or "means that," since they often signal an overreach from a narrow holding.
The Indian Space Policy, 2023 signals that ISRO would eventually move away from commercial satellite and launch activity toward ambitious exploratory missions, while IN-SPACe facilitates a growing private-sector role, though ISRO maintains it will not be "privatised or reduced." Option (c) exaggerates the actual policy direction into an extreme, time-bound claim, a common Prelims trap of inflating a gradual shift into an absolute one, so when a policy is described as a "gradual shift" or "evolving role," it is worth being suspicious of options using absolute words like "complete" or fixed timelines not stated in the source.
- The two countries agreed to work toward doubling bilateral trade within five years.
- Antwerp is a global hub for diamond trading, linked historically to Mumbai and Surat's cutting and polishing industry.
- India and Belgium signed a defence letter of intent, and India will post a resident defence attaché to Brussels.
All three statements are correct, per the visit of Belgian PM Bart De Wever to Delhi: a five-year target to double bilateral trade, the century-old Antwerp-Mumbai/Surat diamond-trade link, and the defence letter of intent alongside a resident defence attaché appointment to Brussels. An "all correct" option is often under-selected out of exam-hall suspicion, since test-takers assume at least one statement must be false, so it is worth not discounting "all statements correct" purely on instinct and instead verifying each one independently, since some UPSC sets do use it as the key.
The 2009 study found that most present-day Indians descend from two differentiated ancient populations that mixed extensively before endogamy took root, and the long-term endogamy that followed, a social practice rather than a biological given, produced strong founder effects and genetic differences between present-day communities. Options (c) and (d) both invert the actual causal direction, since social practice produced genetic difference rather than the reverse, and endogamy predates rather than follows colonial rule. For genetics-and-society questions, it is worth checking which way the causal arrow points, since UPSC often tests whether social practice causes biological patterns or vice versa.
