Which of the following pairs is/are NOT correctly matched ?
(City) – (River)
1. Budapest – Danube
2. Cologne – Rhine
3. New Orleans – Missouri
4. Hyderabad (India) – Paleru
Select the correct answer f

Question

Which of the following pairs is/are NOT correctly matched ?
(City) – (River)
1. Budapest – Danube
2. Cologne – Rhine
3. New Orleans – Missouri
4. Hyderabad (India) – Paleru
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Only 3 and 4. Read the stem twice before you read the options, because this question asks which pairs are NOT correctly matched. You are being asked to collect the errors, not the truths, and the two errors are pairs 3 and 4. Take the four in turn. Budapest and the Danube is correct: the Hungarian capital was formed in 1873 by uniting hilly Buda on the right bank with flat Pest on the left, and the river that separates and defines them is the Danube, Europe's second-longest river, which flows on to the Black Sea. Cologne and the Rhine is correct: Köln grew from the Roman colony of Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium on the left bank of the Rhine, and its cathedral still stands a few hundred metres from the water in the Rhine's great industrial corridor. Pair 3 is wrong. New Orleans stands on the Mississippi, close to the river's delta in Louisiana, not on the Missouri. The Missouri is real and important, but it is a tributary of the Mississippi, joining it just above St. Louis roughly 1,600 kilometres upstream of New Orleans; the cities that sit on the Missouri are Kansas City, Omaha and Bismarck. Pair 4 is wrong too. Hyderabad in India stands on the Musi, a tributary of the Krishna, which cuts the historic Old City around the Charminar off from the newer city to the north and which is dammed upstream at Osman Sagar and Himayat Sagar. The Paleru is a different river altogether — also a Krishna tributary, but one that runs through Khammam district in Telangana and joins the Krishna near Mukteswarapuram in Andhra Pradesh's Krishna district, nowhere near Hyderabad. Two wrong pairs, numbers 3 and 4, and the option that names exactly those two is (c).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This keeps the genuine error at pair 3 but adds Budapest–Danube and Cologne–Rhine as errors, and both of those are correct. Budapest exists because of the Danube: Buda on the hills of the right bank and Pest on the plain of the left bank were separate towns until 1873, and the Chain Bridge across the Danube is the structure that made the merger practical. Cologne is one of the classic Rhine cities, sitting on the left bank in North Rhine-Westphalia. The option also misses the Hyderabad error entirely, so it is wrong twice over.  (b) This one catches both real errors — New Orleans and Hyderabad — and then spoils it by adding Cologne–Rhine to the list. Cologne is on the Rhine; there is no ambiguity about it. Candidates sometimes doubt this pair because they half-remember that Düsseldorf, Bonn, Koblenz, Mainz and Rotterdam are also Rhine cities and assume one of the German ones must belong to a different river. They do not: all of those lie on the Rhine or on its delta. Adding a fourth name to a correct list is the commonest way to lose a mark on a NOT-matched question.  (d) This is the exact inversion of the truth, and it is what a candidate marks who reads the stem as 'which pairs ARE correctly matched'. Budapest–Danube and Cologne–Rhine are precisely the two pairs that are right, so anyone who solved the geography correctly but skimmed the word NOT will land here. It is worth pausing on: the option is a trap built from a correct answer to the opposite question, which is why the word NOT in a UPPSC stem is worth circling before you look at anything else.

Concept: Great cities are almost never placed at random. Before railways, a river was the cheapest road, the water supply, the defensive moat and often the boundary, so settlements grew at bridgeheads, at confluences, at the highest navigable point and at the head of a delta. That is why examiners can build a whole question out of city–river pairs: the pairing is not trivia, it is the logic of where urban India and urban Europe were founded. The trap in such questions is almost always a river from the correct river's own basin — a tributary of the right river, or a nearby river of the same state — because a name that belongs to the same map feels right.

State PCS 2025 Q143 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q143 — Geography PYQ with Answer