CDS GK Questions 2026

Valley glaciers scour away soil, regolith and loose sediment and deepen their valleys into U-shaped glacial troughs, but a fiord forms only when the trough floor lies below sea level, not above it.

Fertile land, nearby iron ore and a supply of forest elephants together made Magadha the strongest of the sixteen Mahajanapadas.

Hydrogen shows 0, +1 or -1 depending on what it is bonded to. In the free element H2 its oxidation number is 0, as for every element in its uncombined state.

A rainbow forms because raindrops split white sunlight into its seven colours, and this splitting of light into colours is dispersion.

The Mahalanobis Model shaped the Second Five Year Plan (1956-61), the Plan Holiday followed in 1966-69, and the Rolling Plan came in 1978-80.

Isobars are atoms of different elements with the same mass number, and 18 + 22 gives a mass number of 40, the same as calcium.

A direction in space needs two angles, one in the horizontal plane and one in the vertical plane, and declination and inclination supply exactly these.

The American historian William Hardy McNeill wrote Plagues and Peoples, published in 1976. The book was one of the first to treat infectious disease as a force in world history.

Demographic dividend is the growth bonus a country gets when its working age group grows larger than its dependent population.

Satavahana kings prefixed their mother's name to their own, as in Gautamiputra Satakarni, "son of Gautami", and Vasishthiputra Pulumavi, "son of Vasishthi".

The Punchhi Commission recommended that the President should decide on a State bill reserved by the Governor within six months.

In this case the Delhi High Court held in 2009 that Section 377, in so far as it criminalised consensual sex between adults in private, violated Articles 21, 14 and 15.

This is the fluid mosaic model of the cell membrane given by Singer and Nicolson in 1972. Each phospholipid has a water-loving (hydrophilic) phosphate head and two water-fearing (hydrophobic) fatty acid tails.

Banks can create credit only from money deposited with them, so when people keep more cash at home, less is lent and re-lent, and the multiplier falls.

Avantivarman founded the Utpala dynasty around 855 CE and is remembered for peaceful rule focused on the welfare of his people, and his minister Suyya carried out famous drainage and irrigation works.

Dalton held that the atom is the smallest, indivisible particle of matter, so his theory cannot explain particles inside the atom.

The Richter scale measures the magnitude of an earthquake, which reflects the energy released at its source, not its intensity.

Swavlamban started that year and has since grown into a national platform that joins the Indian Navy’s operational requirements to what Indian industry and academia can actually build.

Both are to be released at the plenary session, where the Raksha Mantri is the chief guest, and both are intended as working references for industry: they set out the Indian Navy’s technological priorities, its operational requirements and the openings where indigenous developers can contribute.

The wording matters for an examination, because a paper setter will pair the theme with the edition number and the venue.