24 October 2026 Current Affairs: Headlines, GK & MCQs

Light, small and dry pollen is a feature of wind-pollinated plants, not of plants that depend on insects. Insect-pollinated (entomophilous) flowers have to attract a visitor and then make the pollen travel on its body.

Only the third statement is right: the crust is the outermost solid shell of the Earth and it is brittle in nature, which is why it cracks and faults during earthquakes.

Sulphur dissolves completely in carbon disulphide, so the two form a true solution, and a solution is a homogeneous mixture.

The offshore oil terminal at Vadinar, on the Gulf of Kachchh in Gujarat, was built to ease the load on Kandla Port.

Statements 1 and 2 are correct, while statement 3 is wrong. The Satluj rises in the Rakas Tal near Lake Mansarovar in Tibet, at about 4,555 m, and is known there as Langchen Khambab.

Neap tides come when the Sun and the Moon pull on the Earth at right angles to each other, and that happens at the first and third (last) quarter of the Moon.

Fungi have no chlorophyll, so they cannot make their own food by photosynthesis.

Bronze is made by mixing copper (Cu) with tin (Sn), usually about nine parts copper to one part tin. Adding tin makes the metal harder, stronger and more resistant to corrosion than pure copper, which is why bronze was used for tools, weapons, bells, coins and statues.

In the early sculpture at sites such as Sanchi, Bharhut and Amaravati, the Buddha was not carved as a man; his presence was suggested through symbols, each tied to an event of his life.

Lime water is a clear solution of calcium hydroxide, Ca(OH)₂. When carbon dioxide is passed through it, insoluble calcium carbonate, CaCO₃, forms as a fine white precipitate, which makes the lime water turn milky.

An angle of incidence of zero means the ray falls along the normal, that is, perpendicular to the surface. By Snell's law, n₁ sin i = n₂ sin r; if i is zero, sin i is zero, so sin r is also zero and the angle of refraction is zero.

The Panama Canal cuts across the narrow Isthmus of Panama in Central America and joins the Caribbean Sea, an arm of the Atlantic, with the Gulf of Panama on the Pacific.

Friction acts along the surfaces in contact, opposite to the direction of motion, not along the line joining the centres of two bodies, so it is non-central.

A stack is a landform made by erosion, not by deposition. Waves attack a headland and open cracks into caves; when caves on both sides meet, a sea arch forms, and when the roof of the arch collapses, the seaward part is left standing as an isolated rock pillar called…

A p-type semiconductor is made by adding a small amount of a trivalent impurity, such as boron, aluminium, gallium or indium, to pure silicon or germanium.

World Humanitarian Day is marked every year on 19 August to honour aid workers who have been killed or injured while helping others, and to draw attention to people affected by crises.

All three statements describe composite volcanoes, also called stratovolcanoes. Their lava is cooler and more viscous than basalt, so gas cannot escape easily and pressure builds up until the volcano erupts explosively.

A reducing agent is the substance that is itself oxidised while it reduces something else. In hydrazine, N₂H₄, nitrogen has an oxidation number of −2; in nitrogen gas, N₂, it is 0.

The India State of Forest Report 2021, published by the Forest Survey of India, Dehradun, put the forest cover of Arunachal Pradesh at about 79 per cent of its geographical area, the highest among the four Himalayan states listed.

The focus, or hypocentre, is the point inside the Earth where the rocks first break and energy is released. The point on the surface directly above it is the epicentre, which is usually where shaking is felt first and strongest, so statement 1 is correct.

As rivers come down from the mountains onto the plains, their slope suddenly drops and they can no longer carry their heaviest load.

This statement is wrong because bryophytes, the mosses and liverworts, have no true vascular tissue: they lack xylem to carry water and phloem to carry food.

Potassium permanganate, KMnO₄, forms dark purple crystals that contain no water of crystallization; its formula has no attached water molecules.

India adopted the parliamentary form of government from Britain, often called the Westminster model.

At room temperature and normal pressure only two elements are liquids: mercury, a metal, and bromine, a non-metal. Mercury melts at about −39 °C and is used in thermometers and barometers because it stays liquid over a wide range and does not wet glass.

On a hot day the air just above a road or desert sand is much hotter, and so optically rarer, than the air higher up.

The Charter of the United Nations was drawn up at the United Nations Conference on International Organization held in San Francisco, USA, from April to June 1945, and was signed there on 26 June 1945.

The South Atlantic Drift is part of the West Wind Drift, the cold eastward flow that circles Antarctica in the belt of the westerlies, around 40° to 50° south.

When copper is left in moist air for a long time, it slowly reacts with oxygen, water vapour and carbon dioxide.

The law of conservation of mass, stated by Antoine Lavoisier in 1789, says that in a chemical reaction mass is neither created nor destroyed.

Chemical weathering is the breakdown of rocks through reactions such as solution, oxidation, carbonation and hydration, and all of these need water.

The magnetic force on a moving charge is F = q(v × B), and only an upward field turns a westward-moving positive charge towards the north.

Gupta inscriptions show the kings using grand imperial titles and also religious epithets that linked them with the gods.

The Amsterdam-St. Paul Plateau is a raised area of the ocean floor in the southern Indian Ocean, named after the French islands of Amsterdam and Saint-Paul that rise from it.

Bhutan is the country that officially adopted Gross National Happiness, rather than economic output alone, as the measure of its progress.

The munjaniq, also written manjaniq, was a siege engine that hurled heavy stones at fort walls, that is, a catapult.

During El Nino the trade winds of the Pacific weaken or even reverse, so a steady flow of these winds is not one of its results.

India follows a single standard time, Indian Standard Time, for the whole country, and it is ahead of GMT, not behind it.

Gopal Hari Deshmukh (1823–1892) of Maharashtra wrote under the pen name Lokahitawadi, meaning one who works for the good of the people, and the name stuck to him.

Under Article 243D, seats for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in every Panchayat are reserved in proportion to their share of the population of that Panchayat area, so the statement that reservation has nothing to do with population is wrong.

Greta Thunberg, born in Stockholm in 2003, is a Swedish climate activist who became the face of the youth climate movement.

The remark that the commerce of India is the commerce of the world, and that whoever commands it exclusively is the dictator of Europe, is attributed to Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia from 1682 to 1725.

A compound always has a fixed composition by mass, so a variable composition is a property of mixtures, not compounds.

As one climbs, air pressure falls, so each breath delivers oxygen at a lower partial pressure and less of it passes from the lungs into the blood.

The Rihla, meaning journey, is the Arabic travel book of Ibn Battuta, the Moroccan traveller from Tangier who reached India in 1333.

Detroit stands on the Detroit River, which links Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie, and is far from Lake Superior.

Calcium carbonate, CaCO3, is a compound because calcium, carbon and oxygen are chemically combined in it in a fixed ratio.

Chola bronzes are celebrated for their beauty and casting skill, and they follow the same iconographic rules and style as the stone sculpture of the period.

Only statement 3 is wrong, because stratus, nimbostratus and stratocumulus are low clouds, not high clouds. Statement 1 is correct: clouds take two basic forms, layered stratiform sheets formed by gentle lifting of air and heaped cumuliform clouds formed by rising convection currents.

Asha Parekh received the Padma Shri in 1992, chaired the Central Board of Film Certification from 1998 to 2001 as its first woman head, and was given the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for 2020.