- General Awareness
- Current events of national and international importance, games and sports, art and culture of India, Indian literature, monuments and places of India, general science and life science up to class 10, history of India and the freedom struggle, physical, social and economic geography of India and the world, Indian polity and governance including the Constitution, general scientific and technological developments including space and nuclear programmes, United Nations and other important world organisations, environmental issues, computer and applications basics, common abbreviations, transport systems in India, Indian economy, famous personalities of India and the world, flagship government programmes, flora and fauna of India, and important government and public sector organisations. The largest section in both stages.
- Mathematics
- Number system, decimals and fractions, LCM and HCF, ratio and proportion, percentage, mensuration, time and work, time and distance, simple and compound interest, profit and loss, elementary algebra, geometry and trigonometry, and elementary statistics. Arithmetic dominates; the algebra and trigonometry expected stay at school level.
- General Intelligence and Reasoning
- Analogies, completion of number and alphabetical series, coding and decoding, mathematical operations, similarities and differences, relationships, analytical reasoning, syllogism, jumbling, Venn diagrams, puzzles, data sufficiency, statement and conclusion, statement and courses of action, decision making, maps and interpretation of graphs. Both verbal and non-verbal.
Two features of this syllabus reward specific preparation. The general awareness list includes several railway-adjacent themes — transport systems, public sector organisations, government programmes — which appear more often than a general competitive-exam guide would suggest. And the science content sits at class 10 level across physics, chemistry and biology, which is narrow enough to cover completely rather than sample.
That cluster is worth building as a separate one-page document, for the same reason the defence seam matters in CDS: it is examined consistently, it is finite, and almost no general competitive-exam guide covers it. A candidate who spends two evenings assembling a railway awareness sheet from past papers is competing for a predictable slice of the largest section against a field that has mostly ignored it.
CBT 2 is the same subjects, deeper
It introduces no new subject, which is unusual and useful — it means preparation for CBT 1 is not thrown away, and that the transition between stages is about depth rather than about new material. Prepare to CBT 2 depth from the start and CBT 1 takes care of itself, which is the reverse of how most candidates sequence it.
