Geography · Europe: Physiography & Relief
The concept being tested: European regions and political boundaries.
Consider the following pairs: Region — Country: I. Mallorca — Italy II. Normandy — Spain III. Sardinia — France. In how many of the above rows is the given information correctly matched?
None of the three pairs in this question is correctly matched. Mallorca is the largest of Spain's Balearic Islands, not part of Italy. Normandy is a historic region of northern France, famous as the site of the 1944 Allied D-Day landings, not Spain. Sardinia is an autonomous island region of Italy, the second-largest island in the Mediterranean after Sicily, not France — it is Corsica, lying just to its north, that actually belongs to France, and candidates often confuse the two neighbouring islands. Since every single row swaps the region's true country for a wrong one, the correct count of accurately matched pairs is zero, which is why the answer is None.
What UPSC was testing
The question banks on the Sardinia-Corsica mix-up — Corsica, the French island, sits just north of Sardinia, which is Italian — while also testing whether aspirants know Mallorca is Spanish and Normandy is French rather than assuming any plausible-sounding pairing is correct.
How often this comes up
This concept has appeared 3 times in UPSC Prelims General Studies Paper I between 2015 and 2025 — in 2023, 2024 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.