NDA GK Questions 2026

The Great Depression began with the crash of the New York stock market in October 1929, remembered through Black Thursday and Black Tuesday of that month.

Little Boy was the code name of the uranium fission bomb dropped by the United States on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, the first use of a nuclear weapon in war.

The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles and formally ended the First World War between Germany and the Allied powers.

Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in November 1799 in the coup that overthrew the Directory, and he became First Consul of France, which is the point at which the French Revolution is usually said to have ended; he crowned himself emperor five years later, in 1804.

Napoleon Bonaparte was finally defeated on 18 June 1815 at Waterloo in present-day Belgium by the allied armies led by the Duke of Wellington and the Prussian commander Blucher.

The Eiffel Tower was completed in Paris in 1889, a hundred years after the storming of the Bastille in 1789, and it served as the entrance arch of the World's Fair held that year to mark the centenary of the French Revolution.

After the oil shock of 1973 Brazil launched the Proalcool or National Alcohol Programme in 1975, requiring ethanol made from its abundant sugarcane to be blended with petrol and later building cars that could run on pure ethanol; it is the oldest and best known national biofuel programme.

GOBARdhan, which expands to Galvanizing Organic Bio-Agro Resources Dhan, was launched in 2018 by the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation in the Ministry of Jal Shakti as a part of the rural sanitation mission, because turning dung and farm waste into biogas is both a waste management and a…

The Global Biofuels Alliance was launched in September 2023 during the G20 summit held in New Delhi under India’s presidency, with India, the United States and Brazil among its founding members, the three being the largest producers and users of ethanol.

The Pradhan Mantri JI-VAN Yojana was approved in 2019 to give viability gap funding to commercial and demonstration projects that make ethanol from lignocellulosic biomass such as paddy straw and bagasse, since such advanced plants cost far more than ordinary molasses distilleries.

The National Policy on Biofuels of 2018 had set 2030 as the year for twenty per cent ethanol in petrol; the 2022 amendment brought that forward to the ethanol supply year 2025-26, and also widened the permitted feedstock and allowed the production of biofuels in special economic zones for export.

In this notation the letter E stands for ethanol and the number gives its percentage by volume in the blend, so E20 is one fifth ethanol and four fifths petrol, while E10 is a tenth ethanol and E85 is a high blend meant for flex fuel vehicles.

Jatropha curcas yields a non-edible oil seed, and because India cannot spare edible oil for fuel, the National Policy on Biofuels looks to non-edible oils such as Jatropha and Pongamia pinnata, or karanja, along with used cooking oil and animal tallow, as feedstock for biodiesel.

In transesterification a vegetable oil or animal fat is made to react with methanol or ethanol in the presence of an alkaline catalyst such as potassium hydroxide, giving fatty acid methyl esters, which are biodiesel, and glycerol as the by-product.

Biogas is produced by the anaerobic digestion of organic matter, and methane is its largest component, roughly half to three quarters of the gas by volume; this is what makes biogas combustible.

SATAT stands for Sustainable Alternative Towards Affordable Transportation and was launched in October 2018 by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas; under it the oil marketing companies invite entrepreneurs to set up compressed bio-gas plants from agricultural residue, cattle dung and municipal waste and offer to buy the gas…

Second generation biofuels are made from lignocellulosic biomass that is not food, such as paddy straw, wheat straw, bagasse, cotton stalk and municipal solid waste; the cellulose must first be broken down into fermentable sugars, which makes the process costlier and earns these fuels the name advanced biofuels.

Ethanol is the two carbon alcohol obtained by the fermentation of sugars by yeast, and it is the alcohol blended into petrol under the Ethanol Blended Petrol programme.

Milan is the multinational naval exercise hosted by the Indian Navy. It began in 1995 at Port Blair with a few navies of the Bay of Bengal and South East Asia and later moved to Visakhapatnam, growing into a large gathering with a harbour phase of seminars and a sea…

SIMBEX stands for Singapore India Maritime Bilateral Exercise, the longest running naval exercise India holds with any country, begun in 1994 and conducted in the South China Sea, the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal.