NDA GK Questions 2026

Clove is the unopened flower bud of Syzygium aromaticum, picked before it blooms and dried, and it is grown in India chiefly in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Quinine is an alkaloid extracted from the bark of trees of the genus Cinchona, native to South America and grown in India in the Nilgiris and in Darjeeling, and it was the standard treatment for malaria before synthetic drugs appeared.

Saffron is made from the stigmas of the flower of Crocus sativus, and since each flower carries only three stigmas which must be picked by hand, the spice is the most expensive in the world; in India it is grown mainly in the Kashmir valley.

2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid is a synthetic auxin, and when it is sprayed in a heavy dose it throws broad-leaved dicot weeds into uncontrolled growth that kills them, while narrow-leaved cereals such as wheat and rice are far less affected, so it clears weeds from a standing crop.

Auxin made at the shoot tip moves downwards and keeps the lateral buds below it inactive, which is why a gardener who nips off the tip of a hedge plant gets a bushy growth of side branches.

Japanese rice plants attacked by this fungus grew abnormally tall and spindly, a condition called the foolish seedling or bakanae disease, and the substance responsible was isolated from the fungus and named gibberellin; gibberellic acid is the best known member of the group.

It is produced when a plant faces drought, salinity or extreme temperature; it closes the stomata so that water is not lost, for which reason it is called an antitranspirant, and it induces dormancy in seeds and buds so that growth waits for better conditions.

Ethylene is the only gaseous plant hormone, and it raises the rate of respiration in climacteric fruits such as banana, mango and tomato, so a single ripe fruit speeds up the ripening of those around it; the compound ethephon releases ethylene and is used in orchards for uniform ripening.

Temperature falls with height through the mesosphere and reaches the coldest values in the whole atmosphere, about minus 90 to minus 100 degrees Celsius, at its top.

A spit is a ridge of sand or shingle joined to the land at one end, with the other end running out into open water.

Lithification, metamorphism and solidification are each a step in the rock cycle, the endless change of rocks from one type into another.

Gwadar is a deep-sea port on the Arabian Sea coast of Pakistan's Balochistan province. Gwadar lies on the Makran coast, not far from the border with Iran and close to the mouth of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

The Dutt-Bradley thesis was a communist document which held that the Indian National Congress could play a great and foremost part in building an anti-imperialist people's front.

Pollen first reaches the stigma, then the gametes fuse, the zygote divides to form an embryo, and the embryo inside the seed grows into a seedling.

Mirza Ghulam Ahmad founded the Ahmadiyya Movement in 1889 at Qadian, a town in the Gurdaspur district of Punjab. The Ahmadiyya Movement was one of the Muslim reform movements of the late nineteenth century.

PMGSY is a centrally sponsored rural development scheme, launched as part of the poverty reduction strategy, to give all-weather road connectivity to unconnected villages.

Light travels at different speeds in different media, and this change in speed at the boundary makes it bend. Light is fastest in vacuum, about 3 × 10⁸ m/s, and slower in water and glass.

Green plants use sunlight, carbon dioxide and water to make glucose, giving out oxygen as a by-product. Photosynthesis takes place mainly in the chloroplasts of leaf cells, where chlorophyll traps light energy.

Both work in neutral to alkaline conditions, in the mouth and the small intestine, and stop working in the acid of the stomach.

Assam is called the land of the red river and blue hills, the red river being the silt-laden Brahmaputra and the blue hills those that ring its valley.