General Studies Paper I · 2015–2025
UPSC Prelims previous year questions, explained
The real papers, with the official answer and an explanation we wrote ourselves. Sorted by the concept each question is actually testing.
Every question here is from an actual UPSC Civil Services Preliminary examination, General Studies Paper I. The stem, the four options and the answer are UPSC’s. Everything else on the page is Prelimo’s: why that answer is right, what the question was really testing, and how many times the same concept has come up in the last decade.
The questions are filed by subtopic, not by year. Studying a year is nostalgia. Studying a concept and seeing it appear in 2016, 2019 and again in 2024 is how you work out what UPSC keeps coming back to. How our questions are made explains the corpus this is drawn from and the checks each explanation clears.
A question appears here only once we have written and verified its explanation, so this surface is smaller than the corpus and grows as the work does. There is no page with a bare answer letter on it, which is what the rest of the internet already has.