Geography · Non-Metallic Minerals & Distribution
The concept being tested: Global mineral resources distribution.
Consider the following pairs: Country — Resource-rich in: I. Botswana — Diamond II. Chile — Lithium III. Indonesia — Nickel. In how many of the above rows is the given information correctly matched?
All three pairs are correctly matched. Botswana is the world's leading diamond producer by value, with kimberlite mines run through Debswana, a fifty-fifty joint venture between the Botswana government and De Beers that contributes roughly a third of the country's GDP and over four-fifths of its export earnings. Chile holds the world's largest lithium reserves, concentrated in the brine deposits of the Salar de Atacama, and together with Argentina and Bolivia forms the so-called Lithium Triangle that supplies a major share of global lithium supply. Indonesia is the world's largest nickel producer and reserve holder, a position it has consolidated since banning raw nickel ore exports in 2020 to force downstream smelting investment at home. Since each country is genuinely resource-rich in the mineral named against it, with no swapped or invented pairing anywhere in the set, the option stating that all three rows are correctly matched is the right one.
What UPSC was testing
The trap in this 'how many pairs are correctly matched' format is the reflexive assumption that UPSC always seeds at least one false pair; here all three hold, so the question really tests whether an aspirant's static knowledge of global mineral geography (diamond, lithium, nickel hotspots) is secure enough to trust a clean set rather than second-guess it.
How often this comes up
This concept has appeared 6 times in UPSC Prelims General Studies Paper I between 2015 and 2025 — in 2016, 2018, 2020, 2023 and 2025.
The option-by-option autopsy for this question — why each of the other three is wrong, and which neighbouring concept each one was built from — is in the app.