Prelims – Past Questions Analysis – Economics (ShankarIAS) - VISION

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Thursday, June 01, 2017

Prelims – Past Questions Analysis – Economics (ShankarIAS)


We Often Read About Debates That Discuss About Good And Bad Economics In The Newspapers. These Debates Can Have Different Answers Depending Upon The Perspectives, But When It Comes To Civil Services Prelims, Economics Is Definitely Good. Definitely A Scoring Area As Basic Understanding Of The Subject Can Help You Ease Through The Portion In The Question Paper.

Here we go ahead and take a look at all the questions that have been asked from this section over the last four years and briefly discuss them again to help gauge the level of preparation needed in the last few days.
How to read through the tabulation?
  1. A gist of the question is given preceded by the question number in set ‘A’ of the Question Papers. This can be found in the UPSC website.
  2. The sub-topic is a broad classification which can help you zoom in on the probable areas.
  3. The difficulty level is denoted using five stars, with one star corresponding to ‘very easy’ and five to ‘very difficult’. (Obviously, this has some subjectivity)
  4. The ‘Remarks’ column might refer to the source of the question or the nature of the question or even both. Again, this can be subjected to little variance with the perception of the aspirant.


Math time! Out of the 68 questions in Economics over the last four years, over 26% of them come under the one-star rating and 50% of them have two stars. That means over three-fourth of the questions are comfortably within your striking distance. Apart from that, almost 20% are rated three stars which mean that they aren’t questions completely out of reach.
 Another notable trend has been the marked increase in the number of Current Affairs questions over the last two years, especially 2016 witnessing almost 60% of the Economics questions being related to Affairs in news at that point of time.
 Well, with the UPSC Prelims approaching, we wish all of you have a happy hunting day!