NDA GK Questions 2026

In 1897 Thomson passed an electric discharge through a gas at very low pressure and showed that the cathode rays produced were a stream of identical negatively charged particles, far lighter than any atom and the same whatever gas or electrode was used.

Its full name is the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, and it recognises individual rights over land that such families were cultivating, community rights over grazing grounds and water bodies, and rights over minor forest produce, while making the gram sabha the authority…

The Forest Survey of India divides forest cover by the proportion of ground shaded by the tree canopy.

The Forest Survey of India, set up in 1981, has its headquarters at Dehradun in Uttarakhand, the city that is also home to the Forest Research Institute and the Indira Gandhi National Forest Academy, which makes Dehradun the centre of forestry work in the country.

In the early 1970s, in the Arabari range of the Midnapore district of West Bengal, foresters stopped treating villagers as encroachers and instead gave them a share in the protection and in the produce of a degraded sal forest; the forest recovered remarkably, and the experiment became the model for…

The National Forest Policy of 1952 laid down that about thirty-three per cent of the country's geographical area should carry forest or tree cover, and it broke that national figure into about sixty per cent for the hill and mountain regions, where slopes must be held against erosion and landslides…

The Appiko movement started in 1983 in the Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka, in the Western Ghats, where villagers walked into the forest and hugged trees marked for felling by contractors; Panduranga Hegde organised it after studying the Chipko movement of the Himalaya.

Van Mahotsav is observed in the first week of July, which is chosen because the monsoon has arrived over most of the country by then and a newly planted sapling has the best chance of surviving.

The movement began in 1973 in the Chamoli district of the Garhwal Himalaya, which was then part of Uttar Pradesh and has been in the new State of Uttarakhand since 2000.

Successive assessments by the Forest Survey of India have placed Madhya Pradesh first among the States in the absolute area under forest cover, a position it owes to its very large size and to the extensive teak and sal forests of the Satpura, Vindhya and Baghelkhand tracts.

The Bishnoi community of western Rajasthan follows the twenty-nine tenets laid down by Guru Jambheshwar in the fifteenth century, several of which forbid the felling of green trees and the killing of animals, and it is for this reason that khejri groves and herds of blackbuck survive in the desert…

The Forest (Conservation) Act was passed in 1980 to stop the steady loss of forest land to mining, roads, dams and townships.

The princely states were not a small fringe of the map. Standard accounts place their share at roughly two-fifths of the land area of the subcontinent, and some put it close to a half, with around a quarter of the population; about 565 states of every size, from Hyderabad and…

It made Sikkim the twenty-second state of the Union after a referendum in which its people voted to end the rule of the Chogyal and to join India.

These were the former princely units and unions of states, among them Hyderabad, Mysore, Rajasthan, Saurashtra, Madhya Bharat, Travancore-Cochin, PEPSU and Jammu and Kashmir, and each was headed by a Rajpramukh rather than by a Governor.

It was formed in 1948 by grouping Patiala with Kapurthala, Jind, Nabha, Faridkot, Malerkotla, Nalagarh and Kalsia, with the Maharaja of Patiala as Rajpramukh, and it became a Part B state under the Constitution of 1950.

The Nawab of Junagadh, Mahabat Khan III, announced accession to Pakistan in September 1947 although his small state in Kathiawar was surrounded by Indian territory and had a largely Hindu population.

The Act let paramountcy lapse with effect from 15 August 1947, so in strict law every princely state became free either to accede to India, to accede to Pakistan, or to attempt to remain outside both.

The Maharaja had hoped to stay out of both dominions and had signed a standstill arrangement, but when tribal raiders supported from across the border entered the valley and advanced towards Srinagar in late October 1947 he asked India for military help.

The Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan, had signed a Standstill Agreement in November 1947 and then delayed accession while the Razakar militia under Kasim Razvi attacked villagers.