SSC CGL 2025 Tier-I · 17 September 2025, Shift 3 · General Awareness · Question 10 of 100

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 11 September 2026.

Where this paper and its answers come from

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.

Who authored 'The White Tiger', winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize?

(a)Aravind Adiga
(b)Rohinton Mistry
(c)Arundhati Roy
(d)Vikram Seth

Answer

Why

Correct — A. Aravind Adiga wrote The White Tiger, his debut novel, which won the 2008 Booker Prize.

Its narrator, Balram Halwai, a village boy who becomes a driver, tells his story in a letter to the Chinese Premier written over seven nights.

The novel takes on caste, corruption and poverty in a globalised India: option (a).

Why the others are wrong

(b)
Rohinton Mistry — Rohinton Mistry saw each of his three novels shortlisted for the Booker, among them A Fine Balance. The White Tiger is not his: it is Adiga's.
(c)
Arundhati Roy — Arundhati Roy won the Booker in 1997 for The God of Small Things, eleven years before The White Tiger.
(d)
Vikram Seth — Vikram Seth is the author of A Suitable Boy and The Golden Gate. The White Tiger is Adiga's.

Concept

The White Tiger is a darkly comic novel about class in modern India. Balram escapes servitude by killing his employer and starts a taxi business in Bangalore.

Adiga was 33 and publishing his first novel when it won the 2008 Booker. Indian-born winners before him included Salman Rushdie, for Midnight's Children (1981), and Arundhati Roy (1997).

Key facts

The White Tiger (2008) is Aravind Adiga's debut novel and won the 2008 Booker Prize.
Arundhati Roy won the 1997 Booker Prize for The God of Small Things.
Each of Rohinton Mistry's three novels was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Study next

Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, the 2006 Booker winnerGeetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand and the International Booker PrizeVikram Seth's A Suitable Boy

Common traps

Picking Arundhati Roy as the best-known Indian Booker winner: her win came in 1997.
Treating the Booker and the International Booker as one prize: the International Booker honours fiction translated into English.

Here a prize-winning novel is matched to its author. A book about India by a writer in English is also asked at 18 Sep 2025, 12:30, GA Q.10 (An Area of Darkness, keyed V.S. Naipaul).

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.

Topic: Current events — all 156 SSC CGL questions on it, every solved shift.