Answer Key
UPSC Prelims 2024, GS Paper 1: Answer Key and Subject-Wise Analysis
97 questions, cross-verified against the official UPSC answer key. Conducted 16 June 2024 (Set C, booklet series KSPC-P-GSPO).
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Polity | 20 | 21% |
| Geography | 18 | 19% |
| Environment | 16 | 16% |
| Economy | 15 | 15% |
| Science & Technology | 10 | 10% |
| Current Affairs | 8 | 8% |
| History | 7 | 7% |
| Art & Culture | 3 | 3% |
Difficulty breakdown
Easy
16
Medium
63
Hard
18
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.
Q11 · Polity
Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam (106th Amendment)
A landmark constitutional amendment tested at the level of its fine print, not its headline. Most aspirants know the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam reserves seats for women, far fewer know it is tied to the next delimitation exercise rather than the next election, and carries a 15-year sunset clause.
Practise this question →Q33 · Art & Culture
Sanskrit playwrights
Bhasa is one of the few pre-Kalidasa Sanskrit playwrights most aspirants can name, but rarely one whose specific plays they can distinguish from Shudraka's, Vishakhadatta's, or Harshavardhana's. A genuine author-to-work matching question, not just an author-to-era one.
Practise this question →Q46 · History
Vijayanagara and the Portuguese
Most Vijayanagara prep stops at Krishnadevaraya's patronage of Telugu literature and the Battle of Talikota. His coastal diplomacy with the Portuguese, driven by the empire's dependence on imported warhorses, is a less-rehearsed angle on a well-known ruler.
Practise this question →Q86 · Geography
Tropical peatlands
A 2017 scientific finding, not a textbook fact: the Congo Basin's Cuvette Centrale, not Southeast Asia, holds the world's largest tropical peatland carbon stock. The kind of current-affairs-meets-physical-geography question that punishes prep frozen at NCERT-era assumptions.
Practise this question →Q59 · Economy
RBI rules for foreign bank subsidiaries
Precise regulatory detail on RBI's 2016 Wholly Owned Subsidiary framework for foreign banks, the ₹500 crore minimum paid-up capital and the 50 per cent resident-Indian-director requirement. The kind of banking-regulation specificity that rewards reading beyond Ramesh Singh's chapter summary.
Practise this question →Q39 · Current Affairs
Defence forces rank equivalence
A four-row matching question with a single, deliberately placed trap: three rank equivalences are correct, but Colonel matches Captain in the Navy, not Commander, a distinction UPSC clearly expected most aspirants to miss.
Practise this question →Key takeaways
Polity and Geography together accounted for 38 per cent of the paper, 20 and 18 questions respectively, the two heaviest subjects by a wide margin. If either sat below a third of your weekly study time, that is where 2024 punished the imbalance.
History was unusually light, just 7 questions, the thinnest of any major subject this year. Subject weight swings meaningfully year to year, a light year is not a reason to under-prepare it for the next one.
Environment held its place as a top-four subject at 16 questions. It is no longer safe to treat as a lighter add-on to Geography or Science and Technology, it now carries real, standalone weight.
The hard tail was a real but genuine minority, 18 of 97 questions. The other 82 per cent rewarded steady, correct elimination over either pure recall or guessing on the hardest questions, the same pattern worth building a strategy around every year.
What to read next
Concepts from this paper that already have a study note behind them.