Answer Key
UPSC Prelims 2021, GS Paper 1: Answer Key and Subject-Wise Analysis
99 questions, cross-verified against the official UPSC answer key. Conducted 10 October 2021 (Set C, booklet series BXC-U-FTHI/68C).
Subject distribution
Counted directly from the question bank, not estimated, so these numbers match exactly what you will see if you filter the practice list yourself.
| Subject | Questions | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Environment | 19 | 19% |
| Polity | 18 | 18% |
| History | 17 | 17% |
| Economy | 15 | 15% |
| Science & Technology | 11 | 11% |
| Geography | 8 | 8% |
| Current Affairs | 7 | 7% |
| Art & Culture | 4 | 4% |
Difficulty breakdown
Easy
22
Medium
58
Hard
19
Standout questions
These made aspirants pause, either because they were unusually difficult, unusually novel, or because they signal a shift in how UPSC is framing questions.
Q5 · Art & Culture
Tribal Languages of India
Halbi, Ho and Kui sound like they could be dance forms, instruments, or painting styles, the options a question like this is built to tempt you with. All three are simply tribal languages, spoken across central and eastern India.
Practise this question →Q6 · Polity
Bharat Ratna and Padma Awards, Article 18
A rare all-wrong question: the Bharat Ratna and Padma Awards are not 'titles' under Article 18, the Padma Awards have in fact been suspended twice since 1954, and there is no constitutional cap on Bharat Ratnas per year. Every plausible-sounding statement fails.
Practise this question →Q44 · Geography
Salt Lakes of Rajasthan
Didwana, Kuchaman, Sargol and Khatu read like they could be almost anything, reservoirs, glacial lakes, crater lakes. They are all small inland saline lakes in the Thar Desert, cousins of the better-known Sambhar Lake that most prep never mentions by name.
Practise this question →Q54 · History
Gandhi's prison writings
Gandhi's prison writings prep usually stops at his autobiography. 'Songs from Prison', an English rendering of devotional Indian verses composed in jail, is a genuinely lesser-known work attributed to him, tested here specifically to separate the well-prepared from the merely familiar.
Practise this question →Q74 · Environment
New York Declaration on Forests
A four-statement question where exactly two of four plausible claims hold. The New York Declaration on Forests really was endorsed in 2014 with a voluntary 2030 target, but it is not legally binding, and India was not among its original signatories, despite how natural that would sound.
Practise this question →Q83 · Economy
Government securities market infrastructure
A financial-market infrastructure question resting on one specific institutional fact: CDSL was promoted by the Bombay Stock Exchange, not the RBI, even though the RBI does own the NDS-OM trading platform mentioned in the same question.
Practise this question →Key takeaways
History reached 17 questions, the highest count of any year analysed so far, well above 2024's low of just 7. Subject weight swings hard year to year, a light History year elsewhere is not a reason to under-prepare it.
Art and Culture also peaked here, 4 questions, its highest count across the five years analysed. Even at its peak it remains the lightest subject overall, but that peak is still worth the modest prep time it costs.
Easy questions made up 22 per cent of the paper, the highest share of any year analysed so far, well above the next-highest year's 17 per cent. A paper this front-loaded with recall-level questions rewards broad, accurate coverage more than deep specialisation in any one area.
Even on an easier paper, the same elimination discipline holds: several standout questions here worked by offering multiple plausible-sounding statements where only some were true, rewarding aspirants who checked each claim individually rather than accepting a confident-sounding whole.
What to read next
Concepts from this paper that already have a study note behind them.