World places in UPSC Prelims: only 6 of 20 questions were really about borders
UPSC has asked 20 questions on countries, regions and borders since 2016. Most were about which country a place from the news belongs to. What they test, the trap they share, and a plan built on them.
Most aspirants prepare world places by tracing borders on a blank map. The past papers suggest that’s only part of the job. UPSC has asked 20 questions in this area since 2016, but only 6 of them were about who borders whom. The rest asked where a place from the news is, why it was in the news, or what a region’s name covers.
This post looks at all 20 questions and turns them into a plan.
What the numbers say
Three things stand out.
It comes and goes. The area appeared in 8 of the 11 papers. It skipped 2019, 2020 and 2021 completely, then came back hard.
2022 and 2023 were the peak. There were 6 questions in 2022 and 5 in 2023. That is 11 of the 20 in just two papers. Since then it has settled at 1 or 2 a paper: 1 in 2024, 2 in 2025 and 1 in 2026.
It is mostly a matching game. 8 of the 20 questions were “consider the following pairs”. Four more gave a list of countries and asked which ones fit, and two were statement sets (the Bidibidi refugee camp and Indian States). The remaining 6 were plain direct questions, such as which country is part of the Congo Basin.
| Year | Questions |
|---|---|
| 2016 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2 |
| 2018 | 2 |
| 2019–2021 | 0 |
| 2022 | 6 |
| 2023 | 5 |
| 2024 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2 |
| 2026 | 1 |
What UPSC is really testing
By our count, the 20 questions fall into four groups:
- Which country is this place in: 7 questions. A town, region or community from the news, matched to a country. Aleppo, Kirkuk, Mosul and Mazar-i-Sharif. Catalonia, Crimea, Mindanao and Oromia. Donbas, Kachin and Tigray. Mallorca, Normandy and Sardinia. The Bidibidi and Dadaab refugee camps.
- Who borders whom: 6. Which countries touch the Mediterranean, which border Afghanistan, which border Ukraine, and which two countries share the world’s longest border. Two were about India: the fewest States on a road trip from Kohima to Kottayam, and which States border the most and fewest others.
- Why a place is in the news: 4. The Senkaku Islands dispute, Somalia’s famine, a list of countries matched to the reason they were in the news, and regions matched to the conflict they were known for.
- What a region covers: 3. What the Levant means, which country is part of the Congo Basin, and which countries have more than four time zones.
The largest group is not borders. It is placing a name from the news in the right country. And almost every place UPSC picked was in the news for a war, a separatist movement, a coup or refugees. That is the pool to study from.
The trap most questions share
The wrong country is always a believable one. Kurds are matched with Bangladesh, because Rohingya refugees made Bangladesh a news country. Kirkuk is matched with Yemen and Mosul with Palestine, because all of them were in war news. Cabo Delgado sounds Spanish, so it is matched with Spain, though it is in Mozambique. Mallorca, Normandy and Sardinia are each given a neighbouring Mediterranean country instead of their own.
Count the pairs and the pattern is clear. The 8 matching questions had 28 pairs between them, and only 11 were correct. In the six questions that matched a place to its country, 13 of the 21 pairs were wrong.
It has got stricter. The 2022 matching questions had two or three correct pairs each. Since then, all three matching questions (two in 2023 and one in 2025) had no correct pair at all.
In each one, the names look familiar and the countries or reasons are swapped around. In 2023, Ethiopia sat in the list against Kachin instead of Tigray, and the Armenia-Azerbaijan war was listed against North Kivu instead of Nagorno-Karabakh. If every pair looks almost right, “None” is a real option.
The border questions have their own version of the trap: close on the map is not the same as touching.
- Jordan is near the Mediterranean, but Israel and the West Bank lie in between. Its only sea outlet is the Gulf of Aqaba.
- Kyrgyzstan is near Afghanistan, but Tajikistan lies in between.
- The Czech Republic is near Ukraine, but Slovakia lies in between. Belarus separates Latvia and Lithuania from Ukraine.
Of the six countries in the 2023 Ukraine list, only Hungary and Romania share a border with it.
The other border trap is size. Russia is the largest country, so its border with Kazakhstan sounds like the longest. It is second. The longest is Canada and the United States. And in the 2025 time-zone question, Brazil was the odd one out: the United Kingdom and Denmark get more time zones than Brazil from their far-off territories.
How to prepare
1. Keep a “place in the news” list with three fields. For every town, region or community that appears in international news, note:
- the country it is in
- why it is in the news
- what it is often confused with
That last field is where the trap usually sits. Most of the 7 “which country” questions would have been easy with this list.
2. Learn neighbours for the countries in the news. For each country at the centre of a big story, know its full list of land neighbours, and which nearby countries do not touch it. Afghanistan and Ukraine have both been asked this way. Note the country that lies in between: Tajikistan, Slovakia, Belarus.
3. Know which seas each country opens on to. The Mediterranean question turned on Jordan’s single outlet to the Red Sea and Iraq’s short coast on the Persian Gulf.
4. Learn the big region names. The Levant is the eastern Mediterranean shore, not the whole coast and not North Africa, which is the Maghreb. Know which countries make up the Congo Basin. These names keep appearing in news reports.
5. Don’t skip India’s own map. Two questions were about Indian States: the Siliguri corridor on the Kohima-Kottayam route, and which States border the most and fewest others. Uttar Pradesh borders eight States. Sikkim and Meghalaya each border only one. West Bengal, not Rajasthan, has the longest international border.
6. Solve the past questions before reading more. Start with the countries and borders questions, then the wider world places topic.
What to skip: exact border lengths, capitals and populations. No question asked for one. UPSC wants to know where a place is and what is next to it.
Two questions that show the pattern
2023 · Which country. Match Donbas, Kachin and Tigray to a country. None of the pairs was correct. Donbas is in Ukraine, Kachin in Myanmar and Tigray in Ethiopia. The trap was that Ethiopia appeared in the list, just against the wrong region. See the question
2022 · Who borders whom. Which of Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan border Afghanistan? Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The trap was Kyrgyzstan, which is close but cut off by Tajikistan’s Pamir region. Azerbaijan is across the Caspian Sea. See the question
For another area where the trap is a famous name in the wrong place, see our post on species questions. If you are studying rivers and mountains alongside this, our post on rivers and relief covers that area. For the high-yield areas, see the must-do list.