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Every BPSC prelims paper from 2023–2025 solved in full: 579 questions with the correct option, an explanation of why it is right, and a note on why each wrong option was designed to tempt you. Free, no sign-up, in English and हिन्दी.
Bihar Combined Competitive Examination (CCE) · Bihar Public Service Commission
Every one of the BPSC questions on this site is written up like this: the correct option, why it is correct, and why each tempting wrong option is wrong. This is question 1 from the BPSC 71st CCE (2025) paper.
In the following question, out of four words given below, three are alike in some manner and fourth word is different. Find the different one.
Correct: C, STETHOSCOPE. All four words end in -SCOPE, so the setter has deliberately removed the easiest classifier: a feature shared by four options out of four can separate none of them. The classifier that does work is function. A microscope forms a magnified image of something too small for the eye, using an objective and an eyepiece whose powers multiply: a 40x objective with a 10x eyepiece gives 400x. A telescope gathers light from something too far away, either by refraction through lenses (Hans Lippershey's patent application of 1608, Galileo's instrument of 1609) or by reflection off a curved mirror (Newton's reflector, 1668). A periscope sees past an obstacle: two plane mirrors, or two right-angle prisms, are fixed parallel at 45 degrees to the tube, each turning the light through 90 degrees, so the line of sight is shifted bodily along the tube without changing its direction: the arrangement that let submarine crews and trench soldiers look up and out while staying down. All three end at the eye and all three work with light. The stethoscope does not. Rene Laennec built the first one at the Necker Hospital in Paris in 1816 by rolling sheets of paper into a cylinder, and what it carries is sound, not light: the chest-piece picks up heart, breath and bowel sounds and the tubing conducts them to the ear. The clinical act is auscultation: listening. Nothing is ever seen through a stethoscope, which is why it is the one that does not belong.
An optical instrument you look through: lenses refract light to form a magnified image of an object too small for the naked eye, and total magnification is the objective power multiplied by the eyepiece power. It shares the group's defining feature (an image delivered to the eye) so it cannot be the different one. Candidates who choose it are usually splitting the set by distance ('three examine things that are far off or hidden, one examines something near'), a split that collapses because a periscope also looks at objects only a few metres away.
Also optical, and also ending at the eye: lenses in a refractor, of the kind Galileo turned on Jupiter in 1610, or a curved primary mirror in a reflector after Newton's 1668 design, collect light from a distant object and bring it to a focus the eye can use. Being the most familiar word in the set makes it a tempting 'safe' pick for a candidate who is guessing rather than classifying, but familiarity is not a category, and on the light-versus-sound test the telescope sits squarely with the microscope and the periscope.
Open any paper to read every question with the commission's answer key and a full explanation. The PDF is the question paper on its own: no answer key, no explanations, so you can print it and attempt it under exam conditions first.
| Paper | Questions | Solved (English) | हिन्दी | Question paper (PDF) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BPSC 71st CCE (2025) | 150 solved | View solved paper → | हिन्दी में देखें → | EN हिन्दी |
| BPSC 70th CCE Re-exam (2025) | 142 solved | View solved paper → | हिन्दी में देखें → | EN हिन्दी |
| BPSC 70th CCE (2024) | 143 solved | View solved paper → | हिन्दी में देखें → | EN हिन्दी |
| BPSC 69th CCE (2023) | 144 solved | View solved paper → | हिन्दी में देखें → | EN हिन्दी |
We tagged every one of the 574 solved BPSC questions by subject, across 4 papers (69th CCE (2023) to 71st CCE (2025)). The single biggest section is Science & Technology: 158 questions, 27.5% of everything BPSC has asked in these papers, and it has grown from 38 questions in 69th CCE (2023) to 43 in 71st CCE (2025). Each question carries 1 mark, and a wrong answer costs 0.33. Counts below are of questions we have solved and published, not of the full syllabus: so they show where the paper actually goes, not where it could.
| Paper | Science & Technology | History | Geography | Current Affairs | Economy | Polity & Governance | Environment & Ecology | Art & Culture | Tagged |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BPSC 69th CCE (2023) | 38 | 33 | 18 | 14 | 13 | 15 | 7 | 6 | 144 |
| BPSC 70th CCE (2024) | 36 | 27 | 19 | 22 | 15 | 14 | 6 | 4 | 143 |
| BPSC 70th CCE Re-exam (2025) | 41 | 36 | 19 | 13 | 12 | 16 | 2 | 3 | 142 |
| BPSC 71st CCE (2025) | 43 | 25 | 14 | 13 | 19 | 14 | 11 | 6 | 145 |
| All papers | 158 | 121 | 70 | 62 | 59 | 59 | 26 | 19 | 574 |
Average questions per paper across the 2 older papers (69th CCE (2023), 70th CCE (2024)) against the 2 most recent (70th CCE Re-exam (2025), 71st CCE (2025)). A section can move because the commission changed the paper: or because one paper was unusual, so read a small gap as noise.
Subject tags are assigned by UnlockIAS faculty on each question, not generated. Counts cover the 574 solved questions that carry a tag; 5 further solved questions are awaiting a tag and are not counted above.
Where each answer comes from, what an explanation contains, and what the PDF deliberately leaves out.
1 of the 4 solved BPSC papers use the final answer key published by Bihar Public Service Commission: 71st CCE (2025).
For the other 3 papers (70th CCE Re-exam (2025), 70th CCE (2024), 69th CCE (2023)) no commission key is available to us, so the answer is our faculty's, worked out from the question itself. Those papers say exactly that at the top of their answer key. We would rather name the difference than present every answer as official.
Bihar Public Service Commission official site →The download is the question paper on its own: every question and its options, exactly as Bihar Public Service Commission set them, and nothing else. That is deliberate. A previous year paper is only diagnostic the first time you sit it, so the PDF is built to be printed and attempted under timed conditions without the answers one page-turn away. The key and the option-by-option explanations are free on each paper's page here, which is where they are useful: after you have committed to an answer.
A wider scrape of BPSC papers, including Mains. These reproduce the questions as they were set: they are for spotting repeats and topic weight, and do not carry answer keys.
| Year | Prelims | Mains | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | - | 3 Questions | 3 |
BPSC and UPSC share every syllabus heading, but not the weighting. BPSC asks 13.7 points more Science & Technology than UPSC does, and 11.5 points less Environment & Ecology. Counted from 574 solved BPSC questions and 1,000 UPSC prelims questions.
BPSC vs UPSC: full subject weightage comparisonAnswers for 1 of the 4 solved papers are taken from the final answer keys published by Bihar Public Service Commission (official website). For the remaining papers the commission published no answer key, and those papers say so at the top of their answer key. Explanations are written by UnlockIAS faculty. Questions the commission cancelled or awarded grace marks on are labelled on the paper itself.