Defence GK Questions 2026

The CANDU design, from which India's pressurised heavy water reactors descend, burns natural uranium, and natural uranium contains only about seven parts in a thousand of the fissile isotope uranium 235.

The Tarapur Atomic Power Station in Maharashtra was commissioned in 1969 with American assistance and was the first nuclear power station in India as well as in Asia; its first two units are boiling water reactors, a design used nowhere else in the country.

Chilika is a shallow lagoon on the Bay of Bengal coast, separated from the sea by a sandy ridge and joined to it by a narrow mouth, which is why its water is brackish.

The Montreux Record lists Ramsar sites where the ecological character has changed, is changing or is likely to change because of pollution, encroachment, siltation or other interference, so that the parties can direct attention and assistance there.

Charles Darwin explained its formation: a fringing reef grows around a volcanic island, the island slowly subsides, the reef keeps growing upward towards the light, and in the end only a ring of reef and a lagoon are left where the island stood.

Its water is muddy, its tidal range is among the highest in the country and several rivers empty into it, so the clear, silt-free conditions that corals need are absent; it is known instead for tidal energy potential.

These single-celled algae live within the tissue of the coral polyp, photosynthesise, hand most of the food they make to the polyp and give the reef its colour; the polyp in return offers shelter and nutrients, a textbook case of symbiosis.

Mangrove mud is waterlogged and short of oxygen, so these roots grow vertically out of the soil and take in air through small pores called lenticels; they are the classic adaptation asked about in examinations, along with stilt roots and vivipary.

It is named after the sundari tree, holds the only mangrove population of the Royal Bengal tiger, and the Indian portion is a national park, a biosphere reserve and a World Heritage Site.

Keibul Lamjao National Park rests on these mats and is the last natural home of the sangai, the brow-antlered deer of Manipur.

The correct answer is B, 2 February, the anniversary of the signing of the Ramsar Convention in 1971, which is why the day carries that date.

The convention takes its name from Ramsar, a town on the Caspian coast of Iran, where it was signed on 2 February 1971; it came into force in 1975 and is the oldest of the modern global environmental treaties.

The Harike Wetland in Punjab was created by building a barrage just below the point where the Beas joins the Sutlej, so the first pair is correct and it is the only one.

These twin lakes lie near Jammu in the Jammu and Kashmir region, not in Uttar Pradesh, so they are the odd one out in this list.

The Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1848 to 1849 ended with the defeat of the Sikh army at Gujrat, and Dalhousie annexed Punjab in 1849, placing it under a board of administration and sending the boy Maharaja Duleep Singh into exile.

Appointed Peshwa by Shahu in 1713, he secured from the Mughal court the right to collect chauth and sardeshmukhi in the Deccan, and the office became hereditary in his family, so that later Peshwas ruled from Poona while the Chhatrapati at Satara became a figurehead.

Chauth, from the word for four, was one-fourth of the revenue of a territory outside the Maratha kingdom, paid so that Maratha armies would not raid it and would in principle defend it.

By it Ranjit Singh and the East India Company agreed that the river Sutlej would divide their spheres, so the cis-Sutlej Sikh chiefs passed under Company protection and Ranjit Singh turned his energy westwards towards Multan, Kashmir and Peshawar.

The fifth Guru gathered the hymns of his predecessors along with verses of saints such as Kabir, Namdev, Ravidas and Sheikh Farid, and completed the Adi Granth in 1604, installing it in the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar with Baba Buddha as the first granthi.

On Baisakhi in 1699 at Anandpur Sahib, Guru Gobind Singh initiated the first five volunteers, the Panj Pyare, with the ceremony of the double-edged sword and created the Khalsa, giving its members the five articles of faith and the names Singh and Kaur.