NDA II 2026 GAT: what changed in English and GK

If you appeared for NDA II on 14 September, you already know what the General Ability Test does to you: 150 questions in 150 minutes is one minute each, and there is no comfortable second pass. 50 questions of English, then 100 of General Knowledge spread across eight subjects.

We hold every GAT paper since 2017 — 19 sittings, 2,850 questions, each one sorted by subject. So rather than guessing what changed, we can check. Two things did change, one in each half of the paper, and both should change what you study next.

English is a third of the paper, and most of it is learnable

50 questions means 200 of 600 marks before you touch a single GK question. Here is how those 50 broke up:

Look at the top three: vocabulary, grammar and idioms came to 41 of the 50 — 164 marks. None of that asks you to understand a passage or reason about an argument. It asks whether you know the word, know the rule, know the phrase.

That is genuinely good news, and students often miss why. This is the one block in the whole paper you can finish preparing. A word list ends. Grammar rules end. Compare that with Current Affairs, which never ends. If you are short on time, hours spent here pay back more reliably than hours spent anywhere else in the GAT.

The new thing in English: voice and speech

Now go looking for a question on active and passive voice, or direct and indirect speech, in the 15 papers from 2017 to 2024. You will not find one. Not a single question, in any of them.

They turn up first in 2025, and since then they have appeared in every one of the 4 papers written. This one also asked you to name the word class of an underlined word — noun, adverb, conjunction — five times.

This is exactly the kind of shift that old material misses. If your notes or your question bank are more than two years old, they were written for a paper that never asked this. The fix is small: the transformation rules are a closed set, you can learn them in a weekend, and they are now worth roughly 12–16 marks a paper.

History and Polity are now level pegging

For nine years, History was the bigger of the two. Not usually bigger — bigger in all 17 of the 17 sittings from 2017 to 2025. Polity did not beat it once.

In 2026 they tied. In both papers.

History has gone from 16 questions a paper to 9 or 10. Polity has doubled. If you are still giving History three times the hours you give Polity, you are preparing for the 2019 paper.

One reason to trust this rather than take our word for it: NDA I 2026, held in April, was in our bank long before this September paper was. It shows the same tie, 10 and 10. So the change turns up in a paper we sorted months earlier, by a different route — it is not an artefact of how we handled this one.

What did not move — so do not over-correct

The rest of the GK half was remarkably steady, and that matters as much as the parts that shifted. Physics stayed the biggest GK subject at 24, Geography at 20, Chemistry at 16, Biology at 10. All of those are within a question or two of where they have sat for a decade. Nothing there needs rethinking.

And Economics: one question. That is not unusual — across all 19 papers it has never once crossed 3. Four marks. If a teacher or a book has you spending a week on it, that week is better spent on vocabulary.

Which subjects bit hardest

This is our reading of the paper rather than any official rating, so treat it as a guide and not a verdict. Current Affairs was the roughest block — 4 of its 11 questions were hard ones and not a single one was easy. History came next by share, though on only 9 questions, so do not read too much into it. Physics threw up the most hard questions outright — 7 of them. Biology was the kindest subject in the paper: no hard questions at all, and four easy ones out of ten.

The Current Affairs result is the familiar lesson. It is the one subject that punishes last-minute cramming, because you cannot revise something you never read in the first place. Fifteen minutes a day for a year beats a fortnight of panic.

What to drill before NDA I 2027

1. Your English word stock. Vocabulary and idioms alone were 27 questions here. Finite, and it rewards daily repetition more than cleverness. Vocabulary PYQs · Idioms PYQs
2. Transformation grammar. Active and passive voice, direct and indirect speech, word classes. New since 2025, small, and most older material skips it. Grammar PYQs · English strategy guide
3. Polity, at the same level as History. Not more than History — the same. That is already a big change from how most timetables are built. Polity guide · History guide
4. Physics and Geography. Together they were 44 questions — the largest GK block, and steady for ten years. Physics notes · Geography notes
5. Leave Economics alone. One question. Read a page, move on.

Sit the paper yourself

Reading about a paper is not the same as facing 150 questions with the clock running. The whole thing is on PYQ Vault as a timed mock — the real questions, a 150-minute timer, and the actual marking, so you find out what your pace and your guessing habits really cost you.

Method: subject and topic counts come from PYQ Vault’s NDA GAT corpus — 19 sittings, 2,850 questions, 2017–2026 — and are re-checked against the live bank by an automated test. The voice-and-speech counts are taken from the wording of the questions themselves rather than from our own topic labels, so that figure does not depend on how we filed anything. Difficulty is our own reading of this one paper and is not an official rating.