General & Banking Awareness — Previous Year Pattern Questions
Representative practice questions in the style of real banking/SSC exam awareness sections. Deliberately limited to structurally stable questions (definitions, functional distinctions, historical facts) rather than questions with a specific current numeric/officeholder answer — a real exam will also test current rates, current officeholders, and recent scheme updates, which you need to prepare separately from a current-affairs source, not from this static page (see Fundamentals' note on why).
Q1. Which rate is used by RBI to absorb excess liquidity from the banking system?
(a) Repo rate (b) Reverse repo rate (c) Bank rate (d) MCLR
Reverse repo rate is the rate at which RBI borrows from banks, absorbing their excess funds — the correct tool for liquidity absorption specifically.
Q2. CRR is held by banks in which form?
(a) Government securities (b) Cash with RBI (c) Gold reserves (d) Fixed deposits
CRR (Cash Reserve Ratio) is specifically cash, held with RBI, earning no interest — this is the defining distinction from SLR.
Q3. Which act allows banks to seize a defaulter's secured collateral without court intervention for that enforcement action?
(a) IBC 2016 (b) SARFAESI Act 2002 (c) Banking Regulation Act (d) RBI Act 1934
SARFAESI (Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest Act) specifically enables this direct enforcement mechanism.
Q4. RBI's inflation-targeting framework is formally based on which index?
(a) WPI (b) CPI (c) IIP (d) GDP deflator
CPI (Consumer Price Index) is the formal benchmark for RBI's inflation-targeting monetary policy framework.
Q5. Which payment system settles transactions individually and in real-time, rather than in batches?
(a) NEFT (b) RTGS (c) UPI (batched aggregation) (d) ECS
RTGS (Real Time Gross Settlement) settles each transaction individually and immediately — the defining structural difference from NEFT's batched settlement.
Q6. A bank's loan becomes classified as an NPA when payment remains overdue beyond a defined period. What is this classification primarily used for?
(a) Determining the loan's interest rate (b) Regulatory/accounting recognition that the asset is non-performing, triggering provisioning requirements (c) Setting the borrower's credit score (d) Calculating the bank's CRR
NPA classification is a regulatory/accounting recognition with real provisioning (setting aside funds against expected losses) consequences for the bank — not directly a rate-setting or credit-score mechanism.
A note on what's missing from this practice set, deliberately
A real exam's banking/general awareness section will include questions on the current repo rate, current RBI Governor, recent scheme announcements, and other genuinely time-sensitive current-affairs content — none of that is included here, deliberately, since anything stated as a fixed "current" answer on this page would be stale by the time you're reading it. > Note (unverified/time-sensitive by design): supplement this practice set with a current, dated current-affairs source (updated within the last few weeks) for that entire category of question — this page's PYQ set covers only the structurally stable half of what a real exam actually tests.