- Biology — Botany and Zoology
- Diversity in the living world, structural organisation in plants and animals, cell structure and function, plant physiology, human physiology, reproduction in plants and humans, genetics and evolution, biology and human welfare covering health and disease and food production, biotechnology and its applications, and ecology and environment. Ninety questions across botany and zoology — half the paper, and the section most closely bound to the NCERT text.
- Chemistry
- Physical chemistry covering basic concepts, structure of atom, states of matter, thermodynamics, equilibrium, redox reactions, solutions, electrochemistry, chemical kinetics and surface chemistry; inorganic chemistry covering periodic classification, chemical bonding, hydrogen, s-block and p-block elements, d- and f-block elements, coordination compounds and metallurgy; and organic chemistry covering basic principles, hydrocarbons, haloalkanes and haloarenes, alcohols phenols and ethers, aldehydes ketones and carboxylic acids, organic nitrogen compounds, biomolecules, polymers and chemistry in everyday life.
- Physics
- Physical world and measurement, kinematics, laws of motion, work energy and power, motion of systems of particles and rigid bodies, gravitation, properties of bulk matter, thermodynamics, behaviour of perfect gases and kinetic theory, oscillations and waves, electrostatics, current electricity, magnetic effects of current and magnetism, electromagnetic induction and alternating currents, electromagnetic waves, optics, dual nature of matter and radiation, atoms and nuclei, and electronic devices.
The relationship between the syllabus and NCERT is not the same across the three subjects, and understanding that difference saves months. Biology questions frequently derive directly from NCERT lines, including from diagrams, tables and summary sections. Inorganic chemistry is similarly close. Physics and physical chemistry require problem-solving beyond what NCERT exercises provide, though the concepts remain confined to it.
That asymmetry explains a common and expensive confusion. A candidate told that NCERT is everything applies the advice uniformly, reads physics from NCERT alone, and arrives able to state every principle and unable to solve a problem under time. The advice is close to literally true in biology and inorganic chemistry, roughly true in the rest of chemistry, and substantially false in physics.
Read the diagrams and captions, not just the prose
In biology particularly, questions are drawn from labelled diagrams, tables, boxed asides and chapter summaries as readily as from the running text. Candidates who read NCERT as continuous prose and skim the visual material leave a meaningful part of the most heavily weighted subject unread.
