UPPSC 2025 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 19 of 150

Correct — C, Only 4. The question asks which pairs are NOT correctly matched, and only the fourth fails. The Masai (Maasai) are a Nilotic cattle-keeping people of East Africa — the semi-arid savanna and Rift Valley grasslands of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania, the country around the Maasai Mara and the Serengeti — and not of West Africa. The other three pairs are textbook-correct. The Bushmen, properly the San, are the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, spread across Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. The Eskimo peoples, the Inuit and Yupik, live across the Arctic including northern Canada, as well as Greenland, Alaska and eastern Siberia. The Pygmy peoples — the Mbuti, Aka and Twa among them — inhabit the equatorial rainforest of the Congo Basin. One mismatch, and it is pair 4, so the code is 'Only 4'.

• (a)Only 1, 2 and 3 — Exactly inverted. It rejects the three sound pairs and keeps the faulty one. Bushman-Kalahari Desert, Eskimo-Northern Canada and Pygmy-Congo Basin are all standard pairings; this option is what a candidate marks after reading the question as 'which pairs ARE correctly matched'.
• (b)Only 3 and 4 — Pair 4 does fail, but pair 3 does not. The Pygmy peoples are the classic rainforest hunter-gatherers of the Congo Basin — a pairing UPPSC itself used, and treated as correct, in its 2019 Paper-I.
• (d)Only 1 — The Bushmen or San are among the most-documented desert hunter-gatherers in the world and the Kalahari is their homeland; the pair is correct. This option also leaves the genuinely faulty Masai-West Africa pairing untouched.

Questions of this kind test a small standard roster from world human geography in which each community is keyed to one climatic region: Bushman or San to the hot desert of the Kalahari, Bedouin to the deserts of Arabia and the Sahara fringe, Pygmy to the equatorial rainforest of the Congo Basin, Semang to the rainforest of Malaysia, Eskimo or Inuit and the Lapps or Sami to the tundra, Masai to the tropical savanna of East Africa, and Kirghiz to the temperate grassland and steppe of Central Asia. The livelihood follows from the environment — hunting and gathering in desert and rainforest, cattle herding on savanna and steppe, hunting and fishing on the tundra — so getting the region right usually gets the way of life right too.

In a 'NOT correctly matched' list the efficient move is to hunt for the single deliberately loosened pair rather than to prove all four. Three of these are familiar enough to accept on sight, which concentrates the whole question on the Masai — and the trap is small, because the continent is right and only the half of it is wrong. Watch the code as well: because the question asks which pairs are NOT matched, the three-item option is the standard reversal trap for anyone who read the stem as 'correctly matched'.

• The Masai (Maasai) are Nilotic cattle-herding pastoralists of the East African savanna — southern Kenya and northern Tanzania, around the Maasai Mara and the Serengeti
• The Bushmen (San) are hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, found across Botswana, Namibia and South Africa
• The Pygmy peoples — the Mbuti, Aka and Twa among them — live in the equatorial rainforest of the Congo Basin
• 'Eskimo' covers the Arctic peoples of northern Canada, Greenland, Alaska and eastern Siberia; in Canada and Greenland the preferred term today is Inuit, the word 'Eskimo' being regarded there as dated
• West Africa's well-known peoples include the Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba, Igbo and Ashanti — the Masai are not among them

• Reading 'NOT correctly matched' as 'correctly matched' and marking the three-item option
• Accepting 'Masai — West Africa' because the continent is right; the Masai belong to the East African savanna
• Assuming 'Eskimo' means Alaska alone — the Inuit of northern Canada and Greenland belong to the same broad grouping

Both commissions like the pair-matching format for world tribes, and UPPSC runs it repeatedly — Pygmy-Congo basin and Khirghiz-Sudan in 2019, Alaska-Koryak in 2021, Masai-West Africa in 2025. UPSC more often uses Indian tribes and States, or describes a region's climate and livelihood and asks you to name the region.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Masai are traditionally associated with which one of the following environments?

  • (a)The hot desert of the Kalahari
  • (b)The tropical savanna grasslands of East Africa
  • (c)The equatorial rainforest of the Congo Basin
  • (d)The Mediterranean scrubland of North Africa

  Answer(b) The tropical savanna grasslands of East Africa — the Masai are cattle-keeping pastoralists of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following pairs is NOT correctly matched?

  • (a)Semang — Malaysia
  • (b)Bedouin — Arabian Desert
  • (c)Lapps — Northern Scandinavia
  • (d)Bushman — Amazon Basin

  Answer(d) Bushman — Amazon Basin — the Bushmen or San belong to the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa, not to South America.