Consider the following statements regarding the ‘White House’ :
1. The address of the White House is 1800 Pennsylvania Avenue.
2. It is the official residence and workplace of the President of USA.
3.

Question

Consider the following statements regarding the ‘White House’ :
1. The address of the White House is 1800 Pennsylvania Avenue.
2. It is the official residence and workplace of the President of USA.
3. On November 1, 1800, John Adams became the first President to take residence in the building.
4. It is a symbol of American Democracy.
Which of the above statements are correct?

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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) 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) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2023 Q38 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q38 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer