How to use this paper

Thirty questions, NEET pattern. Marking is +4+4 for a correct answer, −1-1 for an incorrect one, 00 for a question left blank. Maximum score 120120.

Time budget: 45 minutes. That is ninety seconds a question, which is the pace the real paper demands once the biology and physics sections have taken their share. Keep a watch running. If a question is still open at two minutes, mark it and move on; come back only if minutes remain at the end. Attempting all thirty at speed beats getting twenty perfect and running out of clock.

This paper is built on recall and fast application, not on long working. Eight questions ask for an oxidation number, including every trap the chapter carries: peroxide linkages, metal hydrides, superoxides, fluorine, and the fractional values that come out of an average. Five ask which species is the oxidising agent and which is oxidised, the pair students swap more often than any other in the chapter. Five ask you to name a reaction type or spot a disproportionation. Three want a coefficient or a count of electrons. Four read the electrochemical series for displacement, for hydrogen from a dilute acid, and for the strongest oxidant and reductant. Three ask what a standard reagent turns into. Two are single-step arithmetic on an nn-factor or an equivalent mass. Four are assertion-reason items and two are match-the-column items, both in the format the paper uses.

Allowed while you work:

  • Pen, rough paper and a watch.
  • The periodic table only for atomic numbers and group positions. Molar masses you need are given in the question.
  • No calculator. Every number here comes out by hand in one or two steps.
  • No log tables and no printed data booklet. The standard electrode potentials needed are supplied inside the questions that use them.

Key Point: Before answering any question that names an agent, fix the direction once: the oxidising agent is reduced and its oxidation number falls; the reducing agent is oxidised and its oxidation number rises. Half the wrong answers in a redox section come from reading that backwards under time pressure.