NDA GK Questions 2026

Golden Rice carries genes that let the grain make beta carotene, the orange pigment that the human body converts into vitamin A, and the colour of the grain gives the variety its name; the aim is to reduce night blindness and childhood blindness in populations whose diet is mainly rice.

The genes called cry genes are taken from Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterium of the soil that forms protein crystals during its spore stage.

This soil bacterium naturally transfers a part of its tumour inducing plasmid, called the Ti plasmid, into the cells of a dicotyledonous plant and causes crown gall disease; genetic engineers disarm the plasmid, insert the gene they want and use the bacterium as a vector, which is why it is…

A restriction endonuclease recognises a short palindromic sequence in DNA and cuts both strands there, leaving sticky ends that can pair with another piece cut by the same enzyme; Hind II was the first such enzyme to be discovered and EcoRI from Escherichia coli is the most widely used.

The Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale puts a storm of the Atlantic and the eastern Pacific in one of five categories by its sustained wind, from Category 1, which begins at about 119 km/h, to Category 5 at 252 km/h and above, and a storm of Category 3 or higher is…

The Bay of Bengal gets about four cyclones for every one that forms in the Arabian Sea.

The eye is ten to fifty kilometres across, the air inside it sinks rather than rises, the wind is light and the sky can even be clear, while the atmospheric pressure there is the lowest in the whole system.

A cyclone is a low pressure system, so air flows inwards towards the centre, and the Coriolis force deflects moving air to the left in the Southern Hemisphere, which turns that inflow into a clockwise spiral.

The India Meteorological Department attaches a colour to the severity of the expected weather so that an administration can act without reading the whole bulletin.

The warning comes in four stages, each tied to a number of hours before the adverse weather is expected on the coast.

The names themselves are contributed by the thirteen member countries of the panel, but the centre at New Delhi, which the India Meteorological Department runs, takes the next name from the list, announces it when a deep depression strengthens into a cyclonic storm, and issues advisories to all the member…

The eight countries of the WMO and ESCAP Panel on Tropical Cyclones agreed on a list of names for this basin and began using them in 2004, long after the Atlantic, where naming had been practice for decades.

The India Meteorological Department puts a system in the highest class, super cyclonic storm, when the sustained wind at its centre reaches 222 km/h, which is 120 knots.

A tropical cyclone runs on the latent heat released when water vapour condenses, so it needs a sea whose surface is at about 26.5 degrees Celsius or warmer, with that warm water reaching down about fifty metres, so that the churning of the sea does not cool the surface.

The Philippines lies in the western North Pacific, and every tropical cyclone of that basin, whether it strikes the Philippines, China or Japan, is called a typhoon.

These are the organs in which lymphocytes are produced and in which they mature into cells able to tell self from non-self; the B cells complete this training in the bone marrow and the T cells in the thymus, a gland behind the breastbone that shrinks with age.

The correct answer is B, the oral polio vaccine, which contains live poliovirus weakened so that it can multiply in the gut and raise immunity without causing the disease; it is the vaccine given as two drops in the pulse polio rounds.

The antibodies, mainly of the IgA class, come ready-made in the first milk, the colostrum, and the child's own immune system does no work, which is why the protection begins at once and lasts only a few months; antibodies of the IgG class reach the foetus through the placenta in…

On meeting an antigen a B lymphocyte multiplies and turns into a plasma cell, which pours out antibodies, that is immunoglobulins, into the blood; this arm of the defence is called humoral immunity, while T lymphocytes kill infected cells and regulate the response in cell-mediated immunity.

BCG stands for Bacillus Calmette-Guerin, a live but weakened strain of the bovine tuberculosis bacterium, and in India it is given soon after birth under the Universal Immunisation Programme, mainly to prevent the severe forms of childhood tuberculosis.