CDS GK Questions 2026

INS Arihant was built under the Advanced Technology Vessel programme and commissioned in 2016; because it carries ballistic missiles, the K-15 Sagarika among them, it completed India's nuclear triad, that is the ability to launch a nuclear weapon from land, from the air and from the sea.

The Kalvari class are conventional diesel-electric attack submarines built at Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders in Mumbai to the Scorpene design under a transfer of technology, and the class includes INS Kalvari, Khanderi, Karanj, Vela, Vagir and Vagsheer.

Tejas is a single-engine multirole fighter designed by the Aeronautical Development Agency and manufactured by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, the public sector company that also builds the Dhruv helicopter, the Prachand light combat helicopter and the Su-30MKI under licence at Nashik.

The indigenous aircraft carrier, commissioned in September 2022 as INS Vikrant, was designed by the Navy's own design organisation and built at Cochin Shipyard in Kerala, which made India one of the few countries able to build a carrier.

The CITES Secretariat is based at Geneva in Switzerland and is administered under the United Nations Environment Programme; it services the Conference of the Parties, maintains the appendices and advises member states on permits and enforcement.

This large land snail is native to East Africa and reached India long ago, probably through the trade in ornamental plants and shells.

The Wild Life (Protection) Amendment Act of 2022 brought the parent Act into line with India obligations under CITES, reorganised its schedules and for the first time inserted an express power allowing the Central Government to regulate or prohibit the import, trade, possession and proliferation of invasive alien species.

Neem is native to the Indian subcontinent, so by definition it cannot be an alien species here, however widely it has been planted; a species is alien only outside its natural range.

The mongoose is a protected animal under the Wild Life (Protection) Act, yet its hair was being used to make artists brushes, and Operation Clean Art was the Bureau first country-wide operation directed at a single wildlife article, ending with large seizures of brushes and raw hair.

Zygogramma bicolorata is a leaf-feeding beetle from Mexico, the native region of Parthenium hysterophorus, and it was introduced in India as a biological control agent because its grubs and adults strip the weed of leaves and check its seed production.

Parthenium hysterophorus reached India from tropical America, reportedly with imported wheat, and spread rapidly over waste ground, roadsides and fallow fields.

The Wildlife Crime Control Bureau is a multi-disciplinary statutory body created in 2007 under section 38Z of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972.

CITES sorts species into appendices according to how badly trade threatens them.

The text of CITES was agreed by the representatives of eighty countries meeting at Washington in the United States in 1973, which is why the treaty is also called the Washington Convention; it then entered into force on 1 July 1975, and India became a party in 1976.

It is a free-floating plant of South American origin that was brought to India for its attractive flowers.

Article 343(2) allowed English for only fifteen years, to 25 January 1965, and Article 343(3) left it to Parliament to continue it by law.

Article 371J, inserted by the Ninety-eighth Amendment Act, 2012, provides a separate development board for this backward region, with reservation in education and in state government posts for people domiciled there, and it is the latest addition to the 371 series.

It was inserted by the Thirteenth Amendment Act, 1962, when Nagaland was created as a state, and it protects Naga customary law and procedure, the ownership and transfer of land and its resources, and gives the Governor a special responsibility for law and order in the state.

Article 351 is a directive to the Union to promote the spread of the Hindi language and to develop it so that it may serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India.

Article 348(2) allows the Governor of a state, with the previous consent of the President, to authorise the use of Hindi or of any other language used for the official purposes of the state in the proceedings of the High Court having its principal seat in that state.