IBPS GK Questions 2026

A table is in second normal form when it is already in first normal form and no non-key attribute depends on only a part of a composite primary key; such a partial dependency is removed by moving that attribute into a table of its own.

The degree of a relation counts its attributes, that is its columns, so a student table holding roll number, name, class and marks has degree four whatever the number of students in it.

Isolation means that transactions running at the same time do not see one another's incomplete work, so two clerks booking the last seat cannot both succeed; the database behaves as though the transactions ran one after the other.

A foreign key is the column that stores values belonging to the primary key of another table, so a marks table can carry the roll number of a student table and the two tables can then be joined; the database uses it to enforce referential integrity, refusing a value that…

The designer picks one candidate key as the primary key of a table, and the database then enforces two rules on it: its value must be different in every row, and it can never be left null, since a missing value would make a row impossible to identify.

TRUNCATE empties a table in one operation, leaving the columns, data types and constraints in place so that the table can be filled again at once; because it changes the object rather than selected rows it is grouped with the Data Definition Language and it is much faster than deleting…

The Data Definition Language deals with the structure of the database rather than with the data inside it, and CREATE is its basic command, used to build a table, a view or the database itself; ALTER, DROP, TRUNCATE and RENAME belong to the same group.

In the vocabulary of the relational model a table is a relation, and one complete horizontal entry of that table, such as all the details of a single student, is a tuple; the ordinary words for it are row and record.

Codd, a British computer scientist working at IBM, set out the relational model in a paper published in 1970, proposing that all data be held in simple two-dimensional tables and joined by matching values rather than by fixed pointers.

The hierarchical model is the first data model used in commercial database software; IBM built its Information Management System on it in the 1960s for the Apollo programme.

The Light We Carry is her second book, written after the memoir Becoming, and it sets out the habits and ideas she uses to face uncertainty.

Orbital, a short novel that follows six astronauts through a day of orbits around the earth, won the Booker Prize in 2024 for the British writer Samantha Harvey.

The American writer Walter Isaacson, who had earlier written the authorised life of Steve Jobs and books on Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, published his biography of Elon Musk in 2023 after following him for two years.

Spare is his own account of his life in and away from the British royal family, and the title refers to the old saying about an heir and a spare, the second son.

The South Korean writer Han Kang received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024 for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical trauma, and she is known for the novel The Vegetarian.

Shashi Tharoor, the writer and parliamentarian, wrote Ambedkar: A Life, a short life of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar; his other recent books include Pride, Prejudice and Punditry, and his earlier works are An Era of Darkness and Why I Am a Hindu.

Heart Lamp gathers short stories written in Kannada by Banu Mushtaq, and it won the International Booker Prize in 2025; it was the first collection of short stories to take that prize.

Her Hindi novel Ret Samadhi, translated into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, won the International Booker Prize in 2022 and became the first book originally written in any Indian language to do so; the prize money is shared equally by the author and the translator.

Raghuram Rajan, who was Governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 2013 to 2016, wrote Breaking the Mould with the economist Rohit Lamba, arguing that India should build on services and skills rather than copy the manufacturing path of East Asia.

Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India's External Affairs Minister and earlier the Foreign Secretary, wrote Why Bharat Matters, in which he explains India's place in a changing world order; his earlier book, published in 2020, is The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World.