General awareness is forty of the hundred marks in CBT 1, and general science is typically about twelve of those forty. That makes it the largest single identifiable block in the paper, and it comes from a syllabus you have already studied once at school. Nothing else in RRB NTPC offers that ratio of marks to hours.
The questions are factual and direct. The task is recall, not derivation.
Physics
Units and measurement. SI base units and the quantities they measure. The ones that recur: newton for force, pascal for pressure, joule for energy and work, watt for power, hertz for frequency, coulomb for charge, volt for potential difference, ohm for resistance, tesla for magnetic flux density, becquerel for radioactivity, candela for luminous intensity, mole for amount of substance. Also the instruments: barometer for atmospheric pressure, hygrometer for humidity, anemometer for wind speed, seismograph for earthquakes, lactometer for milk purity, hydrometer for liquid density, ammeter for current, and manometer for gas pressure.
Motion and force. Newton’s three laws and everyday examples of each. Momentum and its conservation. Circular motion and centripetal force. Friction and its types. Gravitation, the universal law, and the difference between mass and weight, including why weight changes with location and mass does not.
Work, energy and power. Kinetic and potential energy, conservation of energy, and simple machines with the lever classes.
Light. Reflection and refraction, laws of both. Concave and convex mirrors and lenses, and where each is used: convex mirror as a rear-view and security mirror because it gives a wide field of view, concave mirror as a shaving mirror and in headlights. Dispersion and the prism. Total internal reflection, and its application in optical fibres and in the mirage. Defects of vision, being myopia corrected by a concave lens and hypermetropia by a convex lens, plus presbyopia and astigmatism. The human eye and persistence of vision.
Sound. Longitudinal wave nature. Speed in air, water and steel, and the fact that it increases with density of medium and with temperature. Audible range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz. Infrasound and ultrasound with their applications, including SONAR and medical imaging. Echo, reverberation, and the Doppler effect.
Heat. Conduction, convection and radiation. Specific heat capacity, latent heat, and why water has an unusually high specific heat. The anomalous expansion of water and why aquatic life survives winter.
Electricity and magnetism. Ohm’s law. Series and parallel resistance and where each is used in household wiring. Electric power and the kilowatt hour. Heating effect of current and its applications in the fuse and the bulb filament. Magnetic effect of current, the electromagnet, the motor and the generator, and electromagnetic induction. The transformer and why alternating current is used for transmission.
Modern physics. Structure of the atom, radioactivity with alpha, beta and gamma emissions, nuclear fission and fusion, and the difference between them. Semiconductors at a basic level.
Chemistry
Matter. States and their properties, changes of state, and the terms: sublimation, condensation, evaporation. Physical and chemical changes.
Atomic structure. Fundamental particles and their discoverers. Atomic number and mass number. Isotopes and isobars, with examples including carbon-14 and its use in dating. Valency.
Periodic table. Mendeleev’s and the modern periodic law. Groups and periods, and the trends across and down. Common groups by name: alkali metals, alkaline earth metals, halogens and noble gases.
Chemical bonding. Ionic and covalent bonds with examples.
Acids, bases and salts. Properties, indicators, the pH scale, neutralisation, and common salts with their uses: baking soda as sodium bicarbonate, washing soda as sodium carbonate, bleaching powder, plaster of Paris, and gypsum. Also the common and chemical name pairs, which are asked directly: common salt is sodium chloride, quicklime is calcium oxide, slaked lime is calcium hydroxide, marble is calcium carbonate, caustic soda is sodium hydroxide.
Metals and non-metals. Physical and chemical properties. The reactivity series. Alloys and their composition, which is very commonly asked: brass is copper and zinc, bronze is copper and tin, steel is iron and carbon, stainless steel adds chromium and nickel, solder is lead and tin, and german silver is copper, zinc and nickel. Corrosion, rusting and galvanisation. Extraction of metals at a basic level.
Carbon compounds. Allotropes of carbon, being diamond, graphite and fullerene, and why their properties differ. Hydrocarbons, the homologous series, and functional groups. Ethanol and ethanoic acid. Soaps and detergents and why detergents work in hard water.
Everyday chemistry. Fuels and their calorific values. Polymers and plastics. Fertilisers. Common gases and their properties and uses: oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, ammonia, chlorine.
Biology
This is often the most directly scoring of the three, because the questions are almost entirely factual.
Cell biology. Cell as the structural unit, the discovery by Robert Hooke. Prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. Cell organelles and their functions, in particular the mitochondrion as the powerhouse, the ribosome for protein synthesis, the chloroplast for photosynthesis, and the lysosome as the suicide bag. Plant versus animal cell differences. Cell division, mitosis and meiosis.
Plant biology. Photosynthesis and respiration and how they differ. Transpiration. Plant tissues, xylem and phloem and what each transports. Plant hormones. Reproduction in plants and pollination.
Human body systems. Digestive system and the enzymes with their substrates. Respiratory system. Circulatory system, the human heart with its four chambers, blood groups and the Rh factor, and blood components. Excretory system and the nephron. Nervous system and the parts of the brain with their functions. Skeletal system, with the number of bones in an adult being 206. Endocrine glands and their hormones, with insulin from the pancreas, thyroxine from the thyroid, and adrenaline from the adrenal gland.
Nutrition. Vitamins, their chemical names, deficiency diseases and sources, which is asked very frequently: vitamin A as retinol with night blindness, B1 as thiamine with beriberi, B3 as niacin with pellagra, B12 as cobalamin with anaemia, C as ascorbic acid with scurvy, D as calciferol with rickets, and K for blood clotting. Also proteins, carbohydrates, fats and minerals with their deficiency conditions.
Diseases. Communicable and non-communicable. Which pathogen causes what: malaria by Plasmodium spread by the female Anopheles mosquito, dengue by a virus spread by Aedes aegypti, tuberculosis by a bacterium, and so on. Vaccines and immunity.
Genetics. Mendel’s laws, dominant and recessive traits, DNA and RNA, chromosomes with the human number being 46, and sex determination.
Ecology. Ecosystem, food chain and food web, trophic levels, biodiversity, and pollution with its types and effects. Greenhouse gases and global warming. The ozone layer and its depletion.
What to leave out
If time is short, skip these: detailed numerical physics, organic chemistry reaction mechanisms, plant taxonomy beyond the basic groups, and anything requiring derivation. The paper does not go there.
How to study it
Because the questions are recall, spaced repetition works far better than reading.
- One class ten textbook, once, not five reference books. NCERT science for classes nine and ten covers nearly all of this.
- Build lists, because lists are what gets asked. Vitamins and deficiencies. Alloys and composition. Common and chemical names. SI units. Instruments and what they measure. Diseases and their pathogens. These lists are finite and they repeat across years.
- Revise the lists weekly, not the chapters. Ten minutes of list revision retains more than an hour of re-reading.
- Test with a daily quiz rather than by re-reading, because recognition feels like knowledge and recall is what the exam measures.
The full subject breakdown for the paper is in the RRB NTPC syllabus, and the CBT 1 paper analysis shows how the forty general awareness marks have typically been distributed across subjects.
Frequently asked questions
What level is general science in RRB NTPC?
Roughly class ten of the CBSE or an equivalent state board. The questions are factual and direct rather than analytical: which gas, which vitamin, which unit, which scientist. There is no numerical problem solving of the kind a physics paper would contain.
Which of physics, chemistry or biology is most asked?
All three appear, and biology and chemistry tend to be the most direct and therefore the most reliably scoring. Physics questions more often involve a unit, a law or an instrument than a calculation. If you have limited time, secure biology and chemistry first.
Is general science asked in CBT 2 as well?
Yes, within the fifty-mark general awareness section, and at slightly greater depth. The subjects and the approach are the same, so preparation carries over directly from CBT 1 to CBT 2 with no extra work.
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