25 October 2026 Current Affairs: Headlines, GK & MCQs

Metal blocks X-rays far more strongly than body tissue, so it spoils the picture. An X-ray image is a shadow picture.

Each theory is paired with the scientist who put it forward. Immanuel Kant proposed the Gaseous Hypothesis in 1755: a slowly rotating cloud of hot gas condensed to form the Sun and the planets.

Only statement 1 is wrong: these trees shed their leaves in winter, not in summer. Mid-latitude (temperate) deciduous forests grow where summers are warm and moist and winters are cold.

In 1851 Lord Dalhousie called Awadh a cherry that would one day drop into the Company's mouth, and five years later he annexed it.

Dengue virus is a flavivirus, an RNA (ribonucleic acid) virus of the family Flaviviridae. Dengue is spread mainly by the bite of the female Aedes aegypti mosquito, which breeds in clean, stagnant water and bites during the day.

Deflation is the opposite of inflation: the general price level keeps falling over a period of time. When prices fall steadily, the purchasing power of money rises, but the effect on the economy is usually harmful.

William Carey, Joshua Marshman and William Ward, the 'Serampore Trio', ran the Baptist mission at Serampore. Carey reached Bengal in 1793, and Marshman and Ward joined him in 1799.

SGST Acts are passed by each State Legislature, not by Parliament. The 101st Amendment, 2016 added Article 246A, which gives both Parliament and the State Legislatures the power to make laws on GST, and Article 279A, which created the GST Council.

The Arabian plate, which carries most of the Saudi Arabian landmass, is counted among the minor plates.

In inter-cropping the crops share a field at the same time but stand in planned rows. A common pattern is one row of one crop after a set number of rows of another, for example soyabean with maize, or pearl millet (bajra) with cowpea (lobia).

It states that when hot and cold bodies are mixed in an insulated system, heat lost by the hot body equals heat gained by the cold body.

Bank rate and open market operations are instruments of the Reserve Bank's monetary policy; public debt and public revenue belong to fiscal policy.

This is false: the north-east has several tiger reserves. Manas, Kaziranga, Nameri and Orang in Assam, Namdapha, Pakke (Pakhui) and Kamlang in Arunachal Pradesh, and Dampa in Mizoram are all tiger reserves.

The standard hydrogen electrode has a real, non-zero potential; it is only assigned the value zero by convention. The absolute potential of a single electrode cannot be measured, because any measurement needs a second electrode to complete the circuit.

TELNET is an application-layer protocol that lets a user log in to a remote computer and work on it through a text terminal.

Magma is mostly molten silicate, so the minerals that crystallise from it, such as feldspar, quartz, mica, pyroxene and olivine, are silicates.

The first all-India census was attempted in 1872, and from 1881 a census has been held every ten years. The 1872 count, under Viceroy Lord Mayo, was taken in different regions at different times and did not cover the whole country, so it is called the first, non-synchronous attempt.

Platelets, or thrombocytes, release the factors that start blood clotting at a wound. Platelets are tiny cell fragments made from large cells called megakaryocytes in the bone marrow; a healthy adult has about 1.5 to 4.5 lakh of them per cubic millimetre of blood.

Both statements describe the standard method used to draw India's poverty line. A poverty line is the income or spending needed to meet basic needs.

It is one of the two education indicators in NITI Aayog's National Multidimensional Poverty Index. The national MPI measures deprivation, not income, across three equally weighted dimensions: health, education and standard of living.

Peasant risings against moneylenders were common in the 19th century, and the Deccan Riots began at Supa in May 1875.

This statement is wrong: the Benami law is enforced by the Income Tax Department, not the ED. The Directorate of Enforcement, set up in 1956, is a specialised financial investigation agency under the Department of Revenue in the Ministry of Finance, with its headquarters in New Delhi.

A new state is created, or a state's boundaries changed, by an ordinary law of Parliament under Article 3, passed by a simple majority.

Its Challenger Deep, about 10,900 metres (nearly 11 km) below sea level, is the deepest known point of the oceans.

Neither has a Mediterranean climate, so neither has sclerophyll vegetation. Sclerophyll means 'hard leaf'.

This is false: an economic model can be stated in words, shown in diagrams or graphs, or written as equations.

Land left uncultivated for more than one year but less than five years falls in this category of the land revenue records.

This statement is false: diamond is an electrical insulator because it has no free electrons. In diamond, every carbon atom uses all four of its valence electrons to form strong covalent bonds with four other carbon atoms in a rigid three-dimensional network.

The primary structure of a protein is simply the linear order of amino acids joined one after another by peptide bonds.

Urea, CO(NH2)2, contains about 46 per cent nitrogen, the highest of any common solid fertiliser, and is the main nitrogen fertiliser used in India.

Rourkela in Sundargarh district of Odisha matches all three clues: Jharia coal, Sundargarh and Kendujhar iron ore, Hirakud power and water from the Koel and Sankh.

Oxidising power of the halogens falls as we go down group 17, so iodine is the weakest and fluorine the strongest oxidising agent.

A point on a map is fixed where its line of latitude crosses its line of longitude, so both values are needed and enough.

Parenchyma is the basic packing tissue of plants, and it is also present in both xylem (xylem parenchyma) and phloem (phloem parenchyma).

Naneghat is a mountain pass in the Western Ghats of Maharashtra, known for Satavahana cave inscriptions, not for a Chola Shiva temple.

The south-west monsoon usually lasts about 100 to 120 days, from early June to about mid-September. The monsoon reaches the Kerala coast around 1 June and spreads over almost the whole country by early to mid-July.

Java lies wholly in the Southern Hemisphere, roughly between 6° S and 9° S, so the Equator does not pass over it.

All three statements about the Richter scale are correct. Statement 1 is correct: the American seismologist Charles F. Richter devised the scale in 1935 at the California Institute of Technology, working with Beno Gutenberg.

Powers of lenses in contact simply add, so the combination has a power of 2 + 2 = 4 dioptre, and its focal length is 1/4 m, that is 0.25 m. The power of a lens is the reciprocal of its focal length in metres, P = 1/f, and is…

Sodium hydroxide dissolves in water and splits completely into Na+ and OH- ions; the ions carry current and the hydroxide ions make the solution strongly basic.

Statements I and II describe the Coriolis force correctly; statement III is wrong, because away from the equator the wind ends up blowing parallel to the isobars.

Cambium lies along the sides of stems and roots and its dividing cells increase their thickness, which is the work of a lateral meristem.

This is false: aluminium has three electrons in its outer shell and loses all three, so its valency is 3.

Statements 1 and 2 are correct, but statement 3 is wrong because the convection cells that drive plate movement lie in the mantle, not in the crust.

Zinc lies in the middle of the reactivity series, so its oxide can be reduced to the metal by heating it with carbon (coke): ZnO + C → Zn + CO.

The blue colour comes from water of crystallisation: blue vitriol is CuSO4·5H2O, and heating drives off these five water molecules to leave white anhydrous copper sulphate.

The gastric glands in the stomach wall secrete pepsin, which begins the digestion of proteins into smaller peptides. The chief cells of the gastric glands release pepsin in an inactive form, pepsinogen.

This statement is false: GPS was built by the United States for its military, but it has been open to civilian users worldwide for decades.

The girth, or thickness, of a stem increases only through the lateral meristems, the vascular cambium and the cork cambium.

South-east China has a warm, humid subtropical climate with rain in every season, and its natural vegetation is broadleaf evergreen forest of the subtropics.