Defence GK Questions 2026

A reef building coral polyp lives in a close partnership with single celled algae called zooxanthellae that live inside its own tissue.

In the tundra only a thin upper layer of the ground thaws in the brief summer; below it the soil stays frozen through the year, and this permanently frozen subsoil is called permafrost.

Succession is a directional process: each community changes the place a little, making it fit for the next, until a community arrives that is in balance with the climate of the region and can replace itself generation after generation without being replaced by another.

Primary succession starts on a surface that has never held life, a cooled lava flow, a bare rock or a fresh sand dune, and the slowest part of the whole process there is the making of soil: rock has to be weathered grain by grain and organic matter has to…

A bare rock offers no soil, almost no water and no shelter, and only an organism that can survive long spells of drying and can hold on to bare stone can settle there.

The temperate grassland is the same biome the world over, short nutritious grass with almost no tree, but each continent gives it a local name, and the pairs are asked directly in examinations.

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…