30 October 2026 Current Affairs: Headlines, GK & MCQs

Washing soda is the crystalline form of sodium carbonate, Na2CO3·10H2O, sodium carbonate decahydrate. Sodium carbonate is made from common salt by the Solvay (ammonia-soda) process.

No such prophecy is recorded among the causes of the revolt. Rumours and prophecies spread fast in the months before May 1857 and stirred fear and anger.

Ibn Battuta lived at the court of Muhammad bin Tughlaq and described his reign at first hand. Ibn Battuta, a traveller from Tangier in Morocco, reached India in 1333.

Under the Subsidiary Alliance the British promised to protect the ally from internal threats as well as external ones, so B was not a feature.

He belonged to the Suhrawardi order, not the Chishti order. Shaikh Bahauddin Zakariya founded the Suhrawardi order in India at Multan in the thirteenth century.

All four areas are recognised as the major coral reef areas of India. India's coral reefs lie in four main regions.

A rainbow forms when raindrops split white sunlight into its seven colours. When sunlight enters a raindrop, it is refracted, and because each colour bends by a different amount, the colours spread apart.

The Dhanbad-Jamshedpur region is known for coal, iron and steel, not cotton textiles. Cotton mills grew where raw cotton, a humid climate, capital, cheap power and markets came together.

Bats send out ultrasonic squeaks and listen for the echoes to locate obstacles and prey. This method is called echolocation.

Jharkhand has railway divisions such as Ranchi and Dhanbad, but no zonal headquarters. Indian Railways is organised into zones, each headed by a General Manager, and every zone is split into divisions.

This is the Clausius statement of the second law. Rudolf Clausius stated that heat cannot by itself pass from a colder body to a hotter one; work must be done to make it do so.

The rod becomes negative because it gains electrons from the wool. When two materials are rubbed together, only electrons move, because they are the loosely held outer particles of atoms.

The lens of the human eye is a converging (convex) lens, not a diverging one, so statement A is not correct.

The Kelvin and Fahrenheit scales read the same at about 574.25, which is about 301 degrees Celsius. The scales are linked by K = C + 273 and F = (9/5)C + 32.

G has the same value everywhere in the universe, for any two masses. The relation is Newton's law of universal gravitation: every two bodies attract each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

A liquid has no shape of its own, so it must be measured inside a vessel that expands at the same time.

The so-called lead of a pencil is a mix of graphite and clay; it contains no lead metal. Graphite is a crystalline form, or allotrope, of carbon.

Nagara temples belong to north India, but their shikhara is curvilinear, not pyramidal. The Nagara style spread over the land between the Himalayas and the Vindhyas, from Gujarat and Rajasthan to Odisha.

The Philosophy of the Bomb was drafted by Bhagwati Charan Vohra of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, and Yashpal worked on it with him.

In it Ashoka says plainly that he has been a lay follower (upasaka) of the Buddha. Minor Rock Edict 1 is found at places such as Maski, Brahmagiri, Rupnath, Sasaram and Gujarra.

Surya Sen was a schoolteacher in Chittagong, not a lawyer in Dhaka, so statement B is not correct. Surya Sen, called Masterda by his followers, taught mathematics at a school in Chittagong.

With the leaders in jail, people in several regions set up their own governments. The Quit India resolution was passed at the Bombay session of the Congress on 8 August 1942, with Gandhi's call of Do or Die.

The first Administrative Reforms Commission recommended a Lokpal and Lokayuktas in its 1966 report. The first ARC, set up in 1966 under Morarji Desai and later chaired by K. Hanumanthaiya, submitted an interim report on the Problems of Redressal of Citizens' Grievances.

The Congress did support the Khilafat movement, so this statement does not describe it. After the First World War, Indian Muslims feared that the Allies would strip the Ottoman Sultan, the Khalifa, of his power and of control over the holy places of Islam.

Sulphur dioxide dissolves in rainwater to form sulphuric acid, a main cause of acid rain. Burning coal and oil in power stations, smelters and vehicles releases sulphur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen into the air.

Herbert Hope Risley, Home Secretary to the Government of India, wrote these words in an official note in December 1904.

India stretches across about 30 degrees of longitude, and every degree makes a difference of four minutes in local time.

He led the no-tax campaign of the peasants of Bardoli taluka in Gujarat against an unjust rise in land revenue.

Among the four states given, Tamil Nadu has by far the longest coastline, stretching from Pulicat Lake in the north to Kanyakumari in the south.

Dolomite is a sedimentary rock, not an igneous one; it forms from layers of carbonate deposits laid down in water.

Kandukuri Viresalingam saw education for all, including girls, as the base of social reform. Viresalingam (1848–1919) was the leading social reformer of Andhra in the nineteenth century and is often called the father of the Telugu renaissance.

The Mekong river ends in a vast delta in southern Vietnam, where it splits into many channels before entering the South China Sea.

Muhammad Husayn Kashmiri, the finest calligrapher at Akbar's court, was given the title "Zarrin Kalam", meaning Golden Pen. Calligraphy was the most honoured art at the Mughal court, and Akbar ran a large imperial workshop where manuscripts were copied, painted and bound.

Warm sea water, moist air and an unstable atmosphere are the conditions a tropical cyclone needs in order to be born.

At about 1,684 km, the Kolkata–Chennai arm along the east coast is the longest of the four sides of the Golden Quadrilateral.

The Tharu are a tribe of the Terai, the foothill belt along the Nepal border, and live mainly in Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, not in Madhya Pradesh.

The speed of light in a medium is inversely proportional to its refractive index, so the ratio of speeds is the inverse ratio of the refractive indices.

By Census 2011, Jammu and Kashmir had the smallest share of India's population among these four, then Haryana, then Rajasthan, and Bihar the largest.

He wrote the Badshah Nama, the official history of the reign of Shah Jahan. Abdul Hamid Lahori was a pupil of Abul Fazl and was chosen by Shah Jahan to write the history of his reign in the same style as the Akbarnama.

In 1585 Akbar moved his capital from Fatehpur Sikri to Lahore, not to Delhi, so this statement is not correct.

Female Anopheles mosquitoes bite humans because they need blood to mature their eggs, and the malaria parasite can cross the placenta.

Ugram is a 7.62 mm assault rifle designed in India by DRDO for the armed forces and police. Ugram was developed by the Armament Research and Development Establishment (ARDE), Pune, a DRDO laboratory, together with a private Hyderabad firm, Dvipa Armour India, and it was unveiled in January 2024.

The two chambers of the new Parliament House take their interior themes from India's national symbols. The Lok Sabha chamber is designed on the theme of the peacock, the national bird, and the Rajya Sabha chamber on the theme of the lotus, the national flower.

The four bodies were set up in 1950, 1950, 1951 and 2004 in that order. The Election Commission was established on 25 January 1950, a day before the Constitution came into force, under Article 324.

Lateral meristems divide along the sides of the stem and root and add new cells that make them thicker. Meristems are groups of cells that keep dividing.

A silsila stood for all three ideas: the master-disciple link, the chain back to the Prophet and the flow of blessings to followers.

The SGPC was born in 1920 out of the Gurdwara reform (Akali) movement, not out of the Singh Sabhas of the nineteenth century.

The Constituent Assembly was chosen indirectly by the provincial assemblies under a scheme drawn up by the Cabinet Mission of 1946.

The Calvin cycle fixes carbon dioxide into sugar without needing light directly, so it forms the light-independent (dark) reactions. Photosynthesis happens in two stages inside the chloroplast.

Sanikatta lies near Gokarna in the Uttara Kannada district of coastal Karnataka. Sanikatta is one of the oldest traditional salt pans on the west coast, where sea water is let into the fields at the mouth of the Aghanashini river and dried by the sun.