BPSC 69th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 38 of 144

Correct — D, 2, 3 and 4. Statement 1 is the only false one, and it is false by a single digit: the White House stands at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20500, the address the White House itself prints on its own contact page, not 1800 Pennsylvania Avenue. Statement 2 is true and is the building's formal definition — it is the official residence and the workplace of the President of the United States, holding both the Executive Residence where the First Family lives and, since 1901, the West Wing offices from which the presidency is run. Statement 3 is true and precisely dated: on Saturday, 1 November 1800, John Adams, who had until then been living in the President's House in Philadelphia — the national capital from 1790 to 1800 — became the first President to take residence in the still-unfinished building. He wrote to his wife Abigail the next day, "I pray Heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this House, and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof", and Franklin D. Roosevelt later had those words carved into the mantel of the State Dining Room. Statement 4 is true in the ordinary, documented sense: the United States National Park Service, which administers the building's grounds as President's Park, describes visitors as coming to contemplate "the White House itself … as a symbol of the United States and democracy". The claim is also carried in law and listing rather than only in rhetoric: the White House was designated a National Historic Landmark on 19 December 1960. So three of the four hold and only the address fails, which is exactly option (d).

• (a)1, 3 and 4 — This is the option the setter is fishing for, because it is the only one that keeps the false statement. It admits the address as 1800 Pennsylvania Avenue while dropping statement 2 — the one statement in the whole set that nobody disputes, since being the President's official residence and workplace is what the White House is. Any option that rejects statement 2 while accepting the address has the question exactly backwards.
• (b)Only 2 and 3 — This gets the false statement right — it excludes the address — but then also throws out statement 4. Calling the White House a symbol of American democracy is not a stray flourish: it is how the building is officially presented to the public, including by the National Park Service that runs President's Park, and it is the standard descriptive line in every account of the house. Nothing in the statement is factually checkable and wrong, so there is no ground to reject it.
• (c)Only 3 and 4 — This one drops statement 2, the most obviously correct statement on the list, presumably to tempt a candidate who reads 'residence and workplace' as two claims and doubts the second. It is not doubtful: the President's offices have been on the White House campus since Theodore Roosevelt moved all work offices into the newly built West Wing in 1901, and William Howard Taft created the first Oval Office there in 1909.

The White House is the official residence and office of the President of the United States, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. George Washington selected the site in 1791 and a design by the Irish-born architect James Hoban was chosen through a competition the following year; the cornerstone was laid on 13 October 1792 and construction ran about eight years at a reported cost of $232,371.83. Washington is the only President who never lived in it, having died in 1799. British forces burned the building during the War of 1812 and Hoban was brought back to rebuild it; James Monroe moved in during 1817, the South Portico followed in 1824 and the North Portico in 1829. The name is younger than the building: 'Executive Mansion' was the official style until Theodore Roosevelt formally established 'The White House' in 1901. Structural weakness later forced President Truman to have everything but the outer walls dismantled and rebuilt, and the family moved back in 1952. The Residence today has 132 rooms, 35 bathrooms and six levels, with 412 doors, 147 windows, 28 fireplaces, eight staircases and three elevators. Two persistent misconceptions are worth clearing at the same time. The first is that the house got its colour and its name from the whitewashing done to hide the scorch marks of 1814; in fact the public was already calling it the White House by 1811, before the fire. The second is that the whole complex is one building: the Executive Residence at the centre is linked by Jefferson's east and west colonnades to the West Wing, which holds the President's offices, and the East Wing, which was extended in 1946 for further office space — so the 'residence' and the 'workplace' of statement 2 are physically distinct parts of one campus, held together under the care of the National Park Service as President's Park.

Read the four statements as three easy ones and one number, because that is how the item is built. Statements 2 and 4 are definitional and descriptive — what the building is and what it stands for — and statement 3 carries a date that is either right or wrong. Only statement 1 offers a figure that can be quietly altered, and it has been: 1600 has become 1800. Notice the elegance of the trap. The number 1800 is not random — it is the year in statement 3, the year Adams moved in, so a candidate skimming the set sees '1800' twice, reads it as internally consistent, and accepts the address. The discriminating fact is therefore a single digit: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, not 1800. Once statement 1 is out, option (a) dies with it and the choice is among (b), (c) and (d). Statement 2 cannot be rejected, which removes (c); statement 4 is a soft, evaluative claim of the kind an examiner marks true unless it is demonstrably false, and here it is positively supported by the National Park Service's own description, which removes (b). What remains is (d). The wider habit worth building: in a four-statement item, find the statement carrying a number, test that number first, and treat unfalsifiable descriptive statements as intended-true rather than arguing with them.

• The White House's address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20500 — the stem's '1800 Pennsylvania Avenue' is the single false statement in the set.
• John Adams became the first President to take residence on Saturday, 1 November 1800, moving from the President's House in Philadelphia, which had served as the national capital from 1790 to 1800; George Washington chose the site but never lived there.
• Construction: site selected 1791, James Hoban's design chosen by competition in 1792, cornerstone laid on 13 October 1792, about eight years of building at a reported cost of $232,371.83.
• The building was burned by British forces on 24 August 1814, during the War of 1812, in the Burning of Washington; Hoban rebuilt it, James Monroe moved into the Executive Residence in October 1817, and the semicircular South Portico and the North Portico were added in 1824 and 1829.
• By 1948 the load-bearing walls and wooden beams were close to failure, so under President Truman the interior was completely dismantled and rebuilt around a new internal steel frame — the Truman Balcony dates from the same work — and the family moved back in 1952.
• 'Executive Mansion' was the official name until Theodore Roosevelt established 'The White House' as the formal name in 1901; he also moved the work offices into the new West Wing that year, and Taft created the first Oval Office in 1909.
• The Executive Residence has six storeys and about 55,000 square feet of floor space, containing 132 rooms, 35 bathrooms, 412 doors, 147 windows, 28 fireplaces, eight staircases and three elevators; its kitchen can serve dinner to as many as 140 guests.
• The grounds are administered by the National Park Service as President's Park, and the building was designated a National Historic Landmark on 19 December 1960 — the institutional form of the 'symbol of American democracy' claim in statement 4.

• Accepting '1800 Pennsylvania Avenue' because 1800 also appears as the year in another statement — the address is 1600
• Rejecting a soft descriptive statement such as 'a symbol of American Democracy' merely because it is not a hard fact; in this format such statements are intended as correct
• Confusing who built it with who first lived in it — Washington selected the site and oversaw the design but never occupied the house

BPSC likes four-statement world-GK sets in which exactly one statement has been altered by a digit or a year, so the whole item turns on one number while the other three statements are there to look reassuring. UPSC does not ask about buildings, but it asks the same American material in the same shape — its 2005 set on the United States mixed a wrong constitutional date with a correct provision on revenue bills — so the drill is identical: locate the numeric claim, verify it, and let the option grid do the rest.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Who was the first President of the United States to occupy the White House?

  • (a)George Washington
  • (b)John Adams
  • (c)Thomas Jefferson
  • (d)James Madison

  Answer(b) John Adams — he took residence on 1 November 1800; George Washington selected the site but died in 1799 and never lived there.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The name 'The White House' was formally established as the building's official name in 1901 by which President?

  • (a)William Howard Taft
  • (b)Theodore Roosevelt
  • (c)Franklin D. Roosevelt
  • (d)Harry S. Truman

  Answer(b) Theodore Roosevelt — until 1901 the official style was 'Executive Mansion'; Roosevelt also moved the work offices into the newly built West Wing that year.