SSC CGL 2025 Tier-I · 17 September 2025, Shift 2 · General Awareness · Question 12 of 99

We transcribed this text from the pictures on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; the answer is the key SSC colour-marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 13 September 2026.

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SSC does not publish CGL question papers or a public answer key. From 2025 the candidate response sheet prints every question and option as a picture, so the text here is transcribed from those pictures for this shift and checked against them independently; where the layout carries meaning, the picture is shown as well. Each answer is the key SSC colour-marked on that sheet. SSC released a tentative key for challenge and later its final one, both only to candidates behind a login, and the sheet does not say which of the two it carries. The solutions are written by UnlockIAS.

Which of the following is unrelated to the components of population change?

(a)Births
(b)Deaths
(c)Migration
(d)Employment

Answer

Why

Correct — D. NCERT's Class 12 geography text states it plainly: there are three components of population change, births, deaths and migration.

Employment is not among them. It affects population only indirectly, by pushing or pulling migrants → option (d).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Births — Births are a component. They add people, and NCERT measures them by the crude birth rate, live births in a year per thousand of population.
(b)
Deaths — Deaths are a component. They remove people, and natural growth is births minus deaths.
(c)
Migration — Migration is the third component. Actual growth = births − deaths + in-migration − out-migration.

Concept

Population change is the change in the number of inhabitants of a territory over a period of time. It can be positive or negative.

NCERT separates two measures. Natural growth = births − deaths. Actual growth = births − deaths + in-migration − out-migration.

Employment enters through migration: unemployment is a push factor and better job opportunities a pull factor.

Employment is not irrelevant to population, which is what makes it tempting. It works through migration, not as a component in its own right.

Key facts

Population change has three components: births, deaths and migration (NCERT Class 12, Fundamentals of Human Geography, Chapter 2).
Natural growth = births − deaths.
Actual growth = births − deaths + in-migration − out-migration.
Crude birth rate: live births in a year per thousand of population.

Study next

The three stages of demographic transitionPush and pull factors of migrationCrude birth rate, crude death rate and natural growth rate

Common traps

Picking migration as the odd one out because births and deaths are natural events. Migration is the third component.
Treating anything that affects population as a component. Employment works through migration, so it is a factor, not a component.

Here a textbook definition is tested as an odd-one-out: three components and one factor that acts through them.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.

Topic: Geography — all 179 SSC CGL questions on it, every solved shift.