BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 11 of 150

No official answer — BPSC DELETED this question, so no option stands as correct and the mark was credited to every candidate who sat the paper. The Commission recorded its reason in the Remarks column of the final revised key published on 31 October 2025, when it disposed of candidates' objections: the "38th National Junior Athletics Championship 2025" named in the stem had not been held. No such championship took place in 2025, and the most recent edition the Commission could trace had been held in 2023. Once the event itself is missing from the year stated there is no result sheet, no medal table and therefore no bronze-medal count against which any of the four options could be measured — the question fails at its premise, not at its key, which is a different and more serious kind of failure. This was not an isolated slip. Five of the paper's 150 questions were struck out the same day — Q11, Q69, Q75, Q96 and Q118 — and reading the five reasons together is genuinely instructive, because each turns on one defective word or one unchecked fact: a championship that did not happen here; the newspaper called "The Young India" instead of Young India at Q75; 'PROVINCIAL' written where 'PROVISIONAL' was meant at Q96; a claim that Bihar currently produces pyrite at Q118. Note also that the three numbers offered are mutually exclusive — a state cannot have won 4 and 5 and 6 bronze medals at one meet — so option (d), "More than one of the above", could never have been defensible even if the championship had existed. That arithmetic mattered in the hall: this paper awarded +1 for a correct answer and, under the booklet's own instruction 9, deducted 1/3 for a wrong one, so a candidate who could not tie a specific remembered result to this stem was better off leaving it blank. The deletion eventually handed the mark to the guesser and the abstainer alike, but no candidate could have known that on 13 September 2025.

• (a)4 — Cannot be confirmed, and cannot be disproved either — which is precisely the problem. A bronze-medal count needs a results sheet behind it, and the Commission found that the 2025 edition named in the question was never held. The Athletics Federation of India does run a real junior national championship series, so the phrasing sounds authentic; it is the year and the edition attached to it that have no event behind them.
• (b)5 — Cannot be confirmed, for the same structural reason. No result exists for a 38th National Junior Athletics Championship in 2025 against which the figure 5 could be checked. Candidates who half-remembered Bihar's genuine 2025 sports headlines — the state hosted the 7th Khelo India Youth Games that May — could easily have reverse-engineered a plausible small number here, which is exactly the reasoning the question rewarded and should not have.
• (c)6 — Cannot be confirmed, for the same reason as (a) and (b). The last such championship the Commission could trace was held in 2023, two years before the year printed in the stem, and this card deliberately does not quote a 2023 tally in its place: a medal count from a different edition would answer a question that was never asked and would compound the original error rather than correct it.
• (d)More than one of the above — Impossible on its own terms even before the deletion, and this is the reusable lesson. Options (a), (b) and (c) are three different counts of one and the same medal tally, so at most one of them can ever be true and 'more than one' cannot be. BPSC's signature fourth option is only live when the first three are independent claims that could co-exist — never when they are rival values of a single quantity.

Athletics in India is governed by the Athletics Federation of India (AFI), the national federation recognised for the sport, affiliated to World Athletics and to the Asian Athletics Association, with its head office in New Delhi. AFI does not run one national meet but a ladder of them, separated by age band — youth, junior (Under-20), Under-23 and open or senior — alongside the Inter-State Championships and the Federation Cup. Any question of the 'how many medals did our state win' kind therefore sits on top of a calendar with three coordinates, and all three have to be pinned before the number means anything: which meet, which age group, which year. Sitting above the federations is the Union Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, whose Khelo India programme is the government's own competition and talent-identification arm — the Khelo India Youth Games, University Games, Winter Games and Para Games, plus a national network of Khelo India Centres and Accredited Academies. Federation championships and Khelo India Games are two different tracks that BPSC and UPSC both draw current-affairs questions from, and confusing the two is the commonest error in this area: a medal won at a Khelo India Youth Games is not a medal won at a national junior athletics championship, even when the athletes and the age band overlap almost completely.

The reasoning this question actually teaches is verification of the premise before evaluation of the options. Three near-identical small numbers with no 'None of the above' escape is the signature of an item built from a single press clipping rather than from a results table, and the correct first move is to ask whether the named event, in the named year, with the named edition number, exists at all. Here it did not, and the Commission said so in writing. A candidate who could not independently recall the meet was reasoning about the arithmetic of 4 versus 5 versus 6 when the fault lay one level above, in the stem. The single discriminating habit is to treat an edition number ('38th') and a year ('2025') as two separate factual claims that must both be true — an event held annually will have skipped or shifted editions more often than candidates assume, and a wrong edition number is the easiest way for a question-setter to import an error from secondary sources. In the hall the practical consequence is a marks decision, not a knowledge one: with −1/3 for a wrong answer, guessing between three rival values of the same quantity has an expected value below zero unless you can eliminate at least two of them, and here none could be eliminated. Bihar's genuinely landmark sporting event of that year, and the one worth carrying into the exam instead, was a different one entirely — the 7th Khelo India Youth Games, virtually inaugurated by the Prime Minister at Patna's Pataliputra Sports Complex on 4 May 2025 and closing on 15 May, which the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports described as the first major multi-discipline sporting event hosted by Bihar.

• BPSC deleted this question on 31 October 2025 while disposing of candidates' objections, and credited the mark to every candidate; five of the paper's 150 questions were deleted that day — Q11, Q69, Q75, Q96 and Q118.
• The Commission's own recorded reason: no 38th National Junior Athletics Championship was held in 2025, the most recent such championship having been held in 2023 — so no medal tally exists to be counted.
• The Athletics Federation of India is the national governing body for the sport, affiliated to World Athletics and the Asian Athletics Association, head office in New Delhi; its calendar separates youth, junior (Under-20), Under-23 and open or senior championships, so the age band named in a question is not decoration.
• Bihar's real sporting landmark of 2025 was the 7th Khelo India Youth Games — inaugurated 4 May 2025 at the Pataliputra Sports Complex, Patna, closing 15 May, with 27 medal disciplines plus one demonstration sport, spread across Patna, Rajgir, Bhagalpur, Gaya and Begusarai together with New Delhi, and over 10,000 participants including more than 6,000 athletes.
• Sepaktakraw entered the Khelo India Youth Games as a medal sport for the first time in the 2025 edition, with esports as a demonstration event; earlier the same year, in March 2025, India's men's regu sepaktakraw team won the country's first ISTAF World Cup gold at that same Pataliputra Sports Complex in Patna.
• The 71st CCE preliminary paper carried 150 questions for 150 marks in two hours, with +1 for a correct answer and, under the booklet's instruction 9, a deduction of 1/3 mark for a wrong one — the arithmetic that makes a blind guess between three rival numbers a losing bet.

• Assuming that because three plausible small numbers are offered, one of them must be right — here the event behind all three had not taken place in the year stated
• Treating an edition number and a year as one fact: '38th' and '2025' are two separate claims, and a question-setter importing an error from a secondary source usually breaks one of them
• Confusing a Khelo India Youth Games medal with a national junior athletics championship medal — different organisers, different calendars, heavily overlapping athletes
• Treating 'More than one of the above' as a safe hedge: where the first three options are rival values of a single quantity, it can never be true

BPSC's current-affairs block leans hard on Bihar — state schemes, projects, awards, appointments and sport from roughly the year before the paper — and it prefers a bare numerical or locational recall with the distinctive fourth option 'More than one of the above' or 'None of the above', which changes the arithmetic of guessing. Read that fourth option as a definite claim, not an escape hatch. UPSC almost never asks a state medal tally; its sports questions test the design of an institution or a scheme — what the Khel Ratna actually rewards, which sports were added to a named Olympic programme — so the same syllabus area is examined for structure at UPSC and for headline recall at BPSC. And where a premise itself is faulty, as here, the Commission deletes rather than defends.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The 7th edition of the Khelo India Youth Games, held in May 2025, was hosted by which state?

  • (a)Odisha
  • (b)Bihar
  • (c)Madhya Pradesh
  • (d)Tamil Nadu

  Answer(b) Bihar — the Games were inaugurated at Patna's Pataliputra Sports Complex on 4 May 2025 and ran to 15 May across five Bihar cities and New Delhi.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following cities of Bihar was NOT a venue of the Khelo India Youth Games 2025?

  • (a)Rajgir
  • (b)Bhagalpur
  • (c)Muzaffarpur
  • (d)Begusarai

  Answer(c) Muzaffarpur — the five Bihar venues were Patna, Rajgir, Bhagalpur, Gaya and Begusarai, with some events held in New Delhi.