MPSC 2022 Prelims Paper-I · Question 1 of 100

Correct — option (4). Both printed statements fail, and they fail for different reasons, which is why the choice that rejects the pair is the answer. Statement (a) attaches the storm to the wrong year. The cyclonic storm named Sagar formed on 16 May 2018, not in May 2019, and it developed in the Gulf of Aden, the arm of water between Yemen and northern Somalia at the far western end of the sea area the India Meteorological Department watches. A statement that is right about the sea and wrong about the year is not half correct in this format; it is incorrect, and statement (a) has to be rejected on the date alone. Statement (b) fails on geography, and it fails outright. Sagar travelled west-south-westwards along the entire length of the Gulf of Aden, that is to say away from India, and made landfall on the Somaliland coast near Lughaya on 19 May 2018 — the farthest west a landfall has been recorded anywhere in the North Indian Ocean. Its damage fell on Somaliland, Djibouti and Yemen, where flash floods took lives, livestock, crops and property in the coastal districts of Awdal and Woqooyi Galbeed; until Cyclone Gati in 2020 it was the strongest tropical cyclone on record to make landfall in Somalia. The storm never entered the eastern Arabian Sea, so it cannot have disrupted anything on the South Konkan coast. With statement (a) wrong on its date and statement (b) wrong on its whole track, neither can be accepted, and the only option that says so is option (4).

• (1)Statement (a) is correct — Statement (a) alone cannot be accepted, because the year printed in it is wrong. Sagar was a May 2018 storm — it formed on 16 May 2018 and dissipated over Ethiopia and Somaliland a few days later — so a candidate who nominates this option is accepting a sentence that misdates the event by a full year. The Arabian Sea half of the sentence is the part that makes the trap work: Sagar did form in waters the India Meteorological Department counts within its Arabian Sea area of responsibility, so the sentence sounds broadly familiar and the eye slides past the date. The habit worth building is to treat a compound statement as a chain: it is correct only if every link is correct, and a single wrong year, figure or district breaks it. Here the year breaks it, and the statement is simply incorrect.
• (2)Statement (b) is correct — Statement (b) alone is wrong, and it is wrong about the one thing the statement is entirely made of. Sagar moved westward down the Gulf of Aden and struck the Horn of Africa; it did not travel east towards India, and no part of the Maharashtra or Goa coastline felt it. Candidates pick this option because the Konkan coast genuinely has been hit by Arabian Sea cyclones in recent years and the memory of that damage attaches itself to whichever cyclone name is put in front of them. The storms that actually did the damage were different ones: Nisarga, which made landfall near Alibag in Raigad district on 3 June 2020, and Tauktae, which tracked northwards past the Konkan in May 2021 before crossing the Gujarat coast. Attaching the right event to the wrong name is the commonest way this family of questions is lost.
• (3)Statements (a) and (b) are correct — This option asks the candidate to accept both statements at once, and since each of them fails on its own it cannot stand. It is worth seeing why this option is offered at all: in a two-statement question the four choices exhaust the possibilities — only the first is true, only the second is true, both are true, neither is true — so the setter is forced to print an all-correct row whatever the facts happen to be. Its presence is therefore no evidence of anything. The way to handle the layout is to settle each statement independently, writing a tick or a cross beside it before looking at the options at all, and then to read off the row that matches the two marks. Here both marks are crosses, so this option is eliminated the moment the second statement is judged.

Tropical cyclones in the North Indian Ocean are tracked and named by the India Meteorological Department in its role as the Regional Specialised Meteorological Centre for the basin, and the names are drawn from a list contributed by the member countries of the WMO and ESCAP panel that covers the region. Because a single list serves both the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, a name gives no clue at all to where a storm formed or where it went, which is exactly what a question of this kind exploits. Sagar belongs to the small class of storms that form in the far west of the basin. The Gulf of Aden and the Somali coast normally see very few cyclones, because the summer monsoon flow and the cold upwelling along the Somali coast suppress them; that rarity is why Sagar and, two years later, Gati were noted as records for landfall in Somalia. The Arabian Sea has nonetheless become more productive of severe storms in recent years, and the ones that matter to Maharashtra are those that recurve north-eastwards or run north along the Konkan, of which Nisarga in June 2020 and Tauktae in May 2021 are the recent examples. For a candidate the practical unit of knowledge is a four-part label for every named storm worth remembering: the year, the basin, the coast it struck and the damage it did.

This is a two-statement verification item, the format that opens the paper and recurs throughout it, and the discipline it rewards is mechanical rather than clever. Read statement (a), decide it on its own and mark it; read statement (b), decide it on its own and mark it; only then look at the four rows and pick the one that matches your two marks. Candidates lose this question by reading the options first, recognising the words Arabian Sea and Konkan, and choosing a row that feels plausible. The Commission also builds these statements so that one of them is wrong in a single detail rather than in substance — here a year — because that tests whether a candidate holds current-affairs events with their dates attached or merely recognises the names. Cyclones are a favourite subject for it: Maharashtra has a long Konkan coastline, the state has had two damaging Arabian Sea systems in recent years, and the disaster-management chapter of the syllabus makes the topic examinable from several directions at once. Note also that option (4) is the negative row here, and that in this paper such negations are printed in ordinary type on this page with nothing to warn the reader; the reader has to supply the caution.

• The cyclonic storm Sagar formed on 16 May 2018 in the Gulf of Aden, between Yemen and northern Somalia, and not in May 2019 as the first printed statement claims.
• Sagar tracked west-south-west along the length of the Gulf of Aden and made landfall near Lughaya in north-western Somaliland on 19 May 2018, the farthest west landfall recorded in the North Indian Ocean.
• The storm's damage fell on Somaliland, Djibouti and Yemen — flash floods that killed people and livestock and destroyed crops and property in the coastal districts of Awdal and Woqooyi Galbeed.
• Sagar was the strongest tropical cyclone on record to make landfall in Somalia until Cyclone Gati in 2020; cyclone landfalls on that coast are rare.
• The Arabian Sea storms that actually affected the Maharashtra coast in recent years were Nisarga, which crossed near Alibag in Raigad district on 3 June 2020, and Tauktae, which passed north along the Konkan in May 2021 before landfall in Gujarat.

• Accepting a statement because the sea or the region named in it is right, when the year attached to the event is wrong — a compound statement fails if any single link fails
• Transferring the damage caused by one cyclone to another storm's name, which is how Nisarga and Tauktae get confused with storms that never came near India
• Reading the four option rows before deciding the statements, so that a plausible-sounding row is chosen instead of the one that matches an independent judgment
• Assuming a cyclone that formed in the Arabian Sea must have moved towards India, when systems in the far west of the basin usually travel towards the Horn of Africa

Cyclone questions reach MPSC papers in three shapes: as a name-to-basin or name-to-landfall match, as a two-statement verification item of exactly this kind, and as a definition question on the wind-speed categories used by the India Meteorological Department. The Commission prefers storms that are two to four years old at the time of the examination, which for a 2022 paper means the Arabian Sea systems of 2018 to 2021, and it prefers to plant the error in a date or in a coastline rather than in the storm's name, because those are the details a candidate is likeliest to have skipped. The preparation that answers all three shapes is a single line for each recent named storm holding the year, the basin, the track and the coast where it made landfall, together with the reason the storm was notable at all.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The cyclonic storm Sagar, which made landfall in May 2018, crossed the coast of which of the following ?

  • (a)The South Konkan coast of Maharashtra
  • (b)The Somaliland coast of the Horn of Africa
  • (c)The Gujarat coast near Diu
  • (d)The Odisha coast near Puri

  Answer(b) The Somaliland coast of the Horn of Africa — Sagar formed in the Gulf of Aden on 16 May 2018 and travelled west-south-west along it, making landfall near Lughaya on 19 May 2018, the farthest west landfall recorded in the North Indian Ocean. It never entered the eastern Arabian Sea, and the damage it caused fell on Somaliland, Djibouti and Yemen.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which cyclonic storm made landfall near Alibag in Raigad district of Maharashtra on 3 June 2020 ?

  • (a)Tauktae
  • (b)Sagar
  • (c)Nisarga
  • (d)Gati

  Answer(c) Nisarga — it crossed the Maharashtra coast near Alibag on 3 June 2020 and was the Arabian Sea system that came closest to Mumbai in many years. Tauktae, in May 2021, ran north past the Konkan before crossing the Gujarat coast; Sagar struck Somaliland in 2018 and Gati struck Somalia in 2020, and neither of those came near India.