HAL DT/MT — PYQ (Practice Questions)
**This page has been superseded by real, full-length premium mock papers —
see the Practice Exams tab.** Full-length mock papers (160 questions each,
matching the real DT/MT exam's General Awareness / English & Reasoning /
Engineering Discipline structure, one branch-specific paper per engineering
discipline) are now available under Practice Exams, with honest per-question
provenance disclosure (genuinely HAL-sourced vs. GATE-branch technical proxy
vs. general competitive-exam content — visible on each question during
result review). The material below remains as free, narrower-scope
introductory practice (General Awareness and English & Reasoning only, no
discipline-specific technical questions) — start with the full mock papers
for real exam-condition practice.
Framing note: HAL does not publish an official archive of past DT/MT written-exam questions, and the papers circulated by third-party coaching sites cannot be independently verified as authentic — treating them as confirmed past questions would be misleading. What follows is built from this technology's own Fundamentals/Intermediate material (General Awareness, English & Reasoning), framed as practice questions in the same style and topic spread as the real exam — not sourced from any leaked or claimed-authentic exam archive. Questions are deliberately built around static, evergreen facts (HAL corporate history, reasoning/grammar patterns) rather than time-sensitive current affairs, so this page doesn't go stale the way a current-affairs-heavy practice set would.
1. (Domain: General Awareness — HAL Corporate Facts) In what year was HAL founded, and under what original name?
Answer: 1940, originally as Hindustan Aircraft Limited, founded by industrialist Walchand Hirachand. This is exactly the kind of static corporate fact — unlikely to be tested via a tricky angle, but reliably tested directly — that Fundamentals flags as the highest-return GA category to lock in early rather than leave for last-minute revision.
2. (Domain: General Awareness — HAL Corporate Facts) HAL is classified as a Maharatna CPSE. What does that classification actually indicate, and which two tiers sit below it?
Answer: Maharatna is the highest tier in India's CPSE grading system, indicating the greatest financial performance and operational autonomy among central public sector enterprises. Below it sit Navratna (mid tier) and Miniratna (entry tier, itself split into Category I and II) — a CPSE typically moves up this ladder over time as it meets progressively stricter revenue/profit/global-presence criteria. (needs verification — recheck the current Maharatna CPSE count before treating any specific number as current, since new CPSEs are periodically added to each tier.)
3. (Domain: General Awareness — HAL Products) Match: which HAL product is India's first indigenous fighter jet, and which is a light combat helicopter?
Answer: Tejas (LCA — Light Combat Aircraft) is India's first indigenous fighter jet; Prachand (LCH — Light Combat Helicopter) is HAL's light combat helicopter. Both are recurring GA and interview themes specifically because they're HAL's flagship indigenous programs — a candidate should be able to name a product and correctly classify its type (fighter jet, helicopter, trainer aircraft) without hesitation.
4. (Domain: English — Error Spotting) Identify the error: "Each of the candidates were asked to submit their documents before the deadline."
Answer: "Each of the candidates" takes a singular verb ("was," not "were") — "each" is grammatically singular even though it refers to multiple candidates collectively. Corrected: "Each of the candidates was asked to submit their documents before the deadline." This is a subject-verb agreement error, one of the three categories (subject-verb agreement, tense consistency, preposition usage) Intermediate flags as disproportionately tested in PSU-style error-spotting questions.
5. (Domain: English — Vocabulary) What is the most precise one-word substitution for: "A person who is skilled in many different fields"?
Answer: Versatile (or, less commonly tested but also valid: polymath, for someone with deep expertise across many fields specifically, versus versatile's broader "adaptable/many-skilled" sense). One-word substitution questions reward knowing the precise distinction between near-synonyms, not just a rough gist — "versatile" and "polymath" aren't fully interchangeable, and the exam's intended answer usually hinges on that precision.
6. (Domain: Reasoning — Coding-Decoding) If GARDEN is coded as HBSEFO, what is the coding pattern, and how would FOREST be coded the same way?
Answer: Each letter shifts forward by exactly 1 (G→H, A→B, R→S, D→E, E→F, N→O). Applying the same shift to FOREST: F→G, O→P, R→S, E→F, S→T, T→U, giving GPSFTU. As Intermediate's worked example notes, the actual skill being tested is verifying the shift letter-by-letter rather than assuming a pattern from the first pair alone — some questions deliberately use non-uniform shifts to catch that shortcut.
7. (Domain: Reasoning — Syllogism) "All pilots are engineers. No engineer is untrained." Does it follow that "No pilot is untrained"?
Answer: Yes, this conclusion validly follows. Every pilot is an engineer (first premise), and no engineer is untrained (second premise) — so no pilot can be untrained either, since pilots are a subset of engineers and the "untrained" category is fully excluded from the engineer set. This is a case where sketching the sets (all pilots inside the engineer circle, the engineer circle fully outside the "untrained" circle) confirms the conclusion holds — unlike the "some" case in Intermediate's own example, where partial overlap ("some graduates are managers") specifically does NOT guarantee a forced conclusion the way "all" and "no" statements can.
8. (Domain: Reasoning — Number Series) Find the odd one out: 121, 144, 169, 200, 225.
Answer: 121=11², 144=12², 169=13², 225=15² are all perfect squares; 200 is not a perfect square (14² = 196, 15² = 225 — 200 falls between them), so 200 is the odd one out. As with the cubes example in Intermediate, the recurring skill is checking the specific pattern (squares, in this case) against every number individually rather than assuming the first two or three numbers confirm the whole series.
9. (Domain: Reasoning — Blood Relations) "Introducing a man, a woman said, 'His mother is the only daughter of my mother.'" How is the woman related to the man?
Answer: "The only daughter of my mother" is the woman herself (assuming she has no sisters). So "his mother is [the woman]" — meaning the woman IS the man's mother. As Intermediate recommends, sketching this as a two-line relationship chain (woman → her mother's only daughter = herself → therefore "his mother" = the woman) prevents the most common blood-relation error: losing track of whose perspective a pronoun refers to partway through the chain.
10. (Domain: Exam Strategy) A candidate is confident in Reasoning but slow at English comprehension passages. Per this technology's own strategy guidance, how should they sequence their time within the combined English & Reasoning section?
Answer: Attempt quick-win question types first — vocabulary, grammar/error-spotting, and reasoning patterns they're confident in — and deliberately save comprehension passages (which take longer to read per question) for last within the section. Since HAL's English & Reasoning section has no enforced sub-timer splitting the two parts, a candidate who runs short on time only loses comprehension marks (a few questions) rather than losing the faster, easier vocabulary/grammar wins to a crunch caused by getting stuck early on a slow passage.