CDS GK Questions 2026

The taiga forms an almost unbroken belt of needle leaved softwood trees, mainly pine, spruce, fir and larch, right across the northern parts of Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia, and this belt covers a greater area of land than any other biome.

The savanna is a tropical grassland with tall coarse grass and scattered flat topped trees, and its wet season produces an enormous crop of grass.

Kyushu is one of the four main islands of the Japanese archipelago and is of volcanic origin, built by the eruptions of an island arc where one plate dives beneath another; Mount Aso on it has one of the largest volcanic calderas in the world.

The Great Barrier Reef stretches for well over two thousand kilometres along the Queensland coast in the Coral Sea, off the north eastern shore of Australia, and is the largest structure on earth built by living organisms.

Sir Thomas Roe reached India in the second decade of the seventeenth century as the formal ambassador of James the First of England and spent about three years at Jahangir's court, seeking a firm commercial treaty for the East India Company; he obtained trading concessions but not the treaty he…

Abdur Razzaq Samarqandi came from Herat in the fifteenth century as the envoy of the Timurid ruler Shah Rukh, and his account, part of the work Matla-us-Sadain, describes the great fortifications of Vijayanagara in seven concentric walls, the crowded bazaars, the jewel market and the court ceremony, and it is…

Al-Biruni wrote this work in Arabic in the eleventh century as a careful account of Indian religion, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, law, custom and measurement, setting out each belief as its own followers held it and comparing it with Greek and Islamic learning; he had learned Sanskrit for the purpose, and…

Fa-Hien travelled overland into India at the close of the fourth century and stayed for several years, coming chiefly to collect the texts of Buddhist monastic discipline; his account, known as the Record of the Buddhist Kingdoms, notes the charitable rest houses and hospitals, the mildness of punishments and the…

After Alexander's death his general Seleucus Nicator took the eastern part of the empire, was defeated by Chandragupta Maurya and made peace with him, and sent Megasthenes to his court as ambassador.

Bernier was a French physician who spent about twelve years in India in the middle of the seventeenth century and was attached to Prince Dara Shikoh as his physician, later serving the noble Danishmand Khan; he therefore watched the war of succession among Shah Jahan's sons from close quarters.

Marco Polo belonged to a family of merchants of the Republic of Venice, then the leading trading city of the Mediterranean, and he travelled overland to the court of Kublai Khan in China, returning by sea at the end of the thirteenth century.

Abu Rayhan al-Biruni was born in Khwarezm, a region that lies in modern Uzbekistan, and came to India in the eleventh century in the train of Mahmud of Ghazni.

Ibn Battuta, a qazi from Tangier in Morocco, reached Delhi in the 1330s, and the Sultan, impressed by his learning, appointed him qazi of the capital and later sent him as an envoy to the court of China.

Hsuan Tsang, also written Hiuen Tsang or Xuanzang, reached India in the seventh century and spent years in the empire of Harshavardhana of Kannauj, who received him with honour; he studied at the monastery of Nalanda under Shilabhadra, attended the great religious assemblies at Kannauj and at Prayag, and recorded…

It is a leaf-shaped flap of cartilage at the root of the tongue that swings down and covers the opening of the windpipe every time food is swallowed, so that the bolus is guided into the oesophagus instead of the trachea; when it fails we choke and cough.

Most of the carbon dioxide produced by the tissues enters the red blood cells, where the enzyme carbonic anhydrase combines it with water to form carbonic acid, which at once splits into hydrogen and bicarbonate ions; the bicarbonate then travels in the plasma to the lungs, where the reaction is…

It is a dome-shaped sheet of muscle that separates the chest cavity from the abdomen, and when it contracts it flattens, which increases the volume of the chest, lowers the pressure inside the lungs and draws air in; the intercostal muscles between the ribs assist by lifting the rib cage…

The right lung is divided into three lobes, an upper, a middle and a lower, while the left lung has only two, because the heart is tilted towards the left side of the chest and takes up room there; the left lung even carries a notch called the cardiac notch…

The gastric glands secrete hydrochloric acid, which makes the contents of the stomach strongly acidic; pepsin can work only in such a medium, and the acid also kills most of the bacteria swallowed along with food.

At roughly six to seven metres it is by far the longest part of the nine-metre alimentary canal, it is where digestion is completed by pancreatic and intestinal juices, and its inner wall carries millions of finger-like villi that give a vast surface for absorbing glucose, amino acids, fatty acids…