Defence GK Questions 2026

The Law Commission of India, in its 170th Report on Reform of the Electoral Laws in 1999, recommended that there should be one single election for the Lok Sabha and all the legislative assemblies once in five years, and the Commission returned to the subject in a draft report in…

The High Level Committee on Simultaneous Elections was constituted on 2 September 2023 under the chairmanship of former President Ram Nath Kovind and submitted its report on 14 March 2024, recommending a two-step synchronisation of elections and a single electoral roll.

The first four general elections, in 1951-52, 1957, 1962 and 1967, were held simultaneously for Parliament and the state assemblies, and 1967 was the last of them.

Article 83(2) provides that the House of the People shall continue for five years from the date appointed for its first meeting and no longer, and that the expiration of that period operates as a dissolution of the House; it also allows Parliament to extend the term by up to…

India's first satellite, launched in 1975, was named Aryabhata after the astronomer who wrote the Aryabhatiya in 499 CE, explained day and night by the rotation of the earth on its axis and gave a value of pi equivalent to 3.1416.

The Brihat-trayi or great triad of Ayurveda is made up of the Charaka Samhita on internal medicine, the Sushruta Samhita on surgery and the Ashtanga Hridaya of Vagbhata, who also wrote the Ashtanga Sangraha.

Madhava of Sangamagrama, who lived around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, founded the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics, whose members obtained infinite series expansions for pi and for the sine and cosine, anticipating results that Europe reached much later; Nilakantha Somayaji of the same school wrote the Tantrasamgraha in…

The Sanskrit inscription on the Mehrauli pillar praises a king called Chandra, whom historians identify with the Gupta ruler Chandragupta II Vikramaditya, and the pillar's wrought iron has resisted corrosion for about sixteen centuries because of its phosphorus content and the protective film it forms, which is the standard example…

Kanada founded the Vaisheshika school, which classified the categories of existence and held that material things are made of paramanu, indivisible atoms that combine in pairs and larger groups to form the objects we see; the doctrine was reached by reasoning about divisibility rather than by experiment.

Mahaviracharya was a Jain mathematician of the ninth century associated with the Rashtrakuta court, and his Ganita Sara Sangraha is a systematic treatment of arithmetic operations, fractions, series and the areas and volumes of figures, and it was widely used in south India.

Varahamihira, who lived in the sixth century, summarised five earlier astronomical schools in the Panchasiddhantika, wrote the encyclopaedic Brihat Samhita covering astronomy, omens, architecture, gems and the finding of underground water, and composed the Brihat Jataka on horoscopy.

The Sulbasutras are appendices to the Shrauta Sutras and give the geometrical rules for laying out the brick altars of Vedic sacrifice, including the construction of squares and rectangles of a given area and the statement that the square on the diagonal equals the sum of the squares on the…

The Sushruta Samhita is the classical manual of shalya chikitsa or surgery, describing surgical instruments, the removal of the cataract, the setting of fractures, the stitching of wounds and the rebuilding of a severed nose, for which Sushruta is remembered as the father of surgery and of plastic surgery.

Bhaskara II, also called Bhaskaracharya, wrote the Siddhanta Shiromani in 1150 CE in four parts, of which Lilavati deals with arithmetic, mensuration and problems of everyday calculation, Bijaganita with algebra, and Grahaganita and Goladhyaya with astronomy.

Brahmagupta composed the Brahmasphutasiddhanta in 628 CE, in which he treated zero as a number and not merely as a placeholder and gave rules for adding, subtracting and multiplying positive and negative quantities, which he called fortunes and debts; he also wrote the Khandakhadyaka and argued that bodies fall because…

Aryabhata, born in 476 CE, wrote the Aryabhatiya in 499 CE in four sections: the Gitikapada on units of time and the large astronomical cycles, the Ganitapada on mathematics, the Kalakriyapada on the reckoning of time and planetary positions, and the Golapada on the celestial sphere.

K2, 8,611 metres, also called Godwin Austen, is the highest summit of the Karakoram range of the Trans-Himalayan belt and lies in the part of Jammu and Kashmir under illegal occupation, which is why it is often given as the highest point in Indian territory as claimed.

Mullayanagiri, 1,930 metres, in the Baba Budan range of the Chikkamagaluru district, is the highest peak of Karnataka and of the Western Ghats within that state, and the range is also called Chandra Drona.

Sandakphu, 3,636 metres, on the Singalila ridge in the Darjeeling district, is the highest point of West Bengal and a well-known viewpoint from which the Kangchenjunga massif and, in clear weather, Everest itself can be seen.

Phawngpui, 2,157 metres, in the Lushai or Mizo hills, is the highest point of Mizoram, is known as the Blue Mountain, and gives its name to the Phawngpui National Park, also called the Blue Mountain National Park.