SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 19 September 2024, Shift 1 · General Awareness · Question 14 of 100

Text as printed on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; answer per SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 10 September 2026.

Where this paper and its answers come from

SSC does not publish CGL question papers or a public answer key. The questions and options here are reproduced as printed on a candidate's own response sheet for this shift — the Commission's text, unchanged. Each answer is SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet; SSC allowed challenges to it and never publishes a final key. The solutions are written by UnlockIAS.

As per a report of the Ministry of Labour and Employment, what was the rate of unemployment in Maharashtra for the year 2021-22?

(a)3.5%
(b)3.01%
(c)4.4%
(d)4.2%

Answer

Why

Correct — A. The key marks 3.5% as Maharashtra's unemployment rate for 2021-22.

Nothing in the stem lets you compute this. The four figures sit inside a span of about one and a half percentage points, so a number looking plausible is no evidence at all.

The item is pure recall from the published state table, and the government's source for such rates is the Periodic Labour Force Survey.

Why the others are wrong

(b)
3.01% — 3.01% is not the figure the key carries. Its two decimals make it look more precise than the rest, and that look is the whole of its appeal — nothing in the stem lets you rank these four numbers.
(c)
4.4% — 4.4% is the highest number offered and is not the rate the key records for Maharashtra in 2021-22. Sounding right for a large industrial state is not the same as being in the table.
(d)
4.2% — 4.2% sits a fifth of a point from option (c) — a decoy pair placed to make you hesitate between two near-identical numbers. Neither is the figure the key carries.

Concept

An unemployment rate is not the share of the population without work. It is the share of the labour force — people who are working or actively looking for work — who have no work.

Anyone outside the labour force is excluded from both the numerator and the denominator: students, homemakers, the retired, and anyone who has stopped searching.

That is why a state can show a low unemployment rate alongside low employment. If people stop looking, they leave the labour force and the rate falls.

SSC attributes the figure to a report of the Ministry of Labour and Employment. The Ministry quotes the estimates produced by the Periodic Labour Force Survey, so the number behind the stem is survey-based, not an administrative head count.

Key facts

The unemployment rate is measured against the labour force, not the total population.
India's official unemployment estimates come from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), run by the National Statistical Office since 2017-18.
The same year yields different rates under usual status and current weekly status, so a percentage is incomplete without the status it was measured on.

Study next

Periodic Labour Force Survey: usual status versus current weekly statusLabour force participation rate and worker population ratioTypes of unemployment: seasonal, disguised, structural, cyclical

Common traps

Reading the rate as a share of the whole population instead of the labour force.
Treating a two-decimal figure as more authoritative because it looks precise.
Carrying a remembered figure across survey years — state rates move every round.

Unemployment comes up both as a definition and as a published state figure.

The definitional side turns up at 11 Sep 2024, 16:00, GA Q.18 (seasonal unemployment) and 26 Sep 2024, 09:00, GA Q.11. The recall side turns up at 10 Sep 2024, 16:00, GA Q.14, which asks which state had the lowest rate in 2020-21.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.