CDS GK Questions 2026

Article 344(4) provides for this committee to examine the recommendations of the Official Language Commission constituted under Article 344(1) and to report its opinion to the President.

Both were inserted by the Seventh Amendment Act, 1956, which carried out the reorganisation of states on the recommendation of the States Reorganisation Commission.

It added Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali and brought the Eighth Schedule to twenty-two languages, where it still stands.

Sindhi was the first language added to the Eighth Schedule after the Constitution came into force, taking the list from the original fourteen languages to fifteen.

Part XVII is titled Official Language and runs from Article 343 to Article 351, in four chapters: the language of the Union, regional languages, the language of the Supreme Court and the High Courts, and special directives.

Article 343 opens Part XVII of the Constitution and provides in clause (1) that the official language of the Union shall be Hindi in the Devanagari script, with the international form of Indian numerals for official purposes.

The Inland Vessels Act, 2021 replaced the Inland Steam Vessels Act of 1917, a colonial law under which every state registered vessels separately.

Sahibganj lies on the Ganga in the north-eastern corner of Jharkhand and its terminal was built to move coal and stone chips from the Rajmahal belt by water instead of road.

The Jal Marg Vikas Project, taken up with assistance from the World Bank, deepens the channel of the Ganga between Haldia and Varanasi and builds multi-modal terminals, jetties and navigation aids so that larger vessels can sail through the year.

Shipping and navigation on inland waterways declared by Parliament to be national waterways is a Union List subject, which is why a central Act is needed to declare each waterway.

The Barak between Lakhipur and Bhanga, about 121 km, serves the Barak valley of southern Assam, and through Karimganj it joins the protocol route across Bangladesh, which makes it the lifeline of a region cut off from the rest of Assam by hills.

National Waterway 3 runs 205 km from Kollam to Kottapuram along the West Coast Canal and includes the Champakara and Udyogmandal canals, which serve the industrial belt near Kochi.

The National Waterways Act, 2016 brought together in one statute the five waterways already declared between 1986 and 2008 and added many more, making 111 in all, spread over rivers, canals, creeks, estuaries and backwaters in most states of the country.

The Authority came into being in 1986 under the Inland Waterways Authority of India Act, 1985, and its headquarters is at Noida in Uttar Pradesh.

National Waterway 2 follows the Brahmaputra for 891 km inside Assam, from Dhubri on the Bangladesh border to Sadiya in the upper valley, and its principal terminal is Pandu near Guwahati.

The correct answer is C, 1,620 km, which makes National Waterway 1 the longest of India's national waterways and the one with the largest cargo movement.

National Waterway 1 runs 1,620 km from Haldia in West Bengal to Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh, through West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and was the first waterway to be declared national, in 1986.

The correct answer is A, the Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park at Darjeeling, the highest altitude zoo in India, which runs recognised conservation breeding programmes for the red panda, the snow leopard and the Himalayan wolf, and has released captive-bred red pandas into the Singalila landscape.

The correct answer is B, Kuno National Park in the Sheopur area of Madhya Pradesh, where cheetahs brought from Namibia and South Africa were released from 2022 under the cheetah reintroduction project; the cheetah had been declared extinct in India in 1952.

The breeding centres stand in the Jaisalmer region, near the Desert National Park, which holds the largest surviving population of the bird, and they are run by the state forest department with the Wildlife Institute of India: eggs are collected from the wild, hatched in incubators and the chicks reared…