NDA GK Questions 2026

A Vande Bharat rake is a self-propelled electric multiple unit: the traction motors and control equipment are slung under the coaches themselves, so power is spread along the length of the train instead of being concentrated in one vehicle.

The first Vande Bharat Express was flagged off on 15 February 2019, after the train set had been built at the Integral Coach Factory under the name Train 18 and tested on Indian track.

The correct answer is B, the Integral Coach Factory at Chennai, which designed the train set under the project name Train 18 and rolled out the first rake.

Kavach works on the movement of trains: it reads the position and speed of a locomotive from trackside tags, compares that with the signal and the permitted speed, and brakes the train when the driver does not.

Safety Integrity Level is a scale of four grades used for safety related electronic systems, and level four is the most demanding, meaning the probability of a dangerous undetected failure is designed to be the lowest of all.

It is the research, design and standards wing of Indian Railways, has its headquarters at Lucknow, and developed Kavach in partnership with Indian manufacturers, first under the name Train Collision Avoidance System.

Kavach is an electronic safety system that acts on a moving train when its driver does not: it applies the brakes if a signal at danger is being approached without braking, holds a train back from passing a red signal, and keeps two locomotives fitted with the system from closing…

Tropical thorn forest and scrub is the natural vegetation of the semi-arid belt that runs through Rajasthan, Gujarat, Haryana, south-western Punjab, western Madhya Pradesh and parts of the Deccan interior, where rainfall falls short of 70 centimetres.

Sholas are small, dense, stunted evergreen forests that survive in the sheltered valleys and folds of the high hills of the Western Ghats above about 1,500 metres, and they alternate with rolling grassland to form the shola grassland mosaic, a habitat of the Nilgiri tahr.

It works under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, has its headquarters at Dehradun, maps the forest and tree cover of the country with satellite imagery and field checks, and brings out the India State of Forest Report once every two years.

The National Forest Policy of 1952 fixed the goal of keeping about one-third of the total land area of the country under forest, with a larger share in the hills and mountains, where slopes need tree cover to hold the soil, and a smaller share in the plains.

Harry Champion and S. K. Seth revised the earlier survey of Indian forest types in 1968 and grouped the forests into major groups such as moist tropical, dry tropical, montane subtropical, montane temperate, sub-alpine and alpine, each divided further into types, using the climatic controls of rainfall, humidity and temperature.

Mangroves grow in the salty, waterlogged mud of deltas and creeks, where the soil holds almost no oxygen, so the roots send up narrow pegs called pneumatophores above the mud surface to breathe, and many species also stand on arching stilt roots for support in the soft ground.

The sundari, whose botanical name is Heritiera fomes, is the dominant mangrove of the Ganga and Brahmaputra delta and gives the Sundarbans its name; its timber is hard and was long used for boats and posts.

These forests grow where annual rainfall exceeds 200 centimetres, on the windward western slopes of the Western Ghats, in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, in upper Assam and along the hills of the north-east.

Melocanna baccifera, the muli bamboo, covers large tracts of Mizoram and the neighbouring hills and flowers only once in about half a century, after which the whole stand dies.

Indian forests are classified administratively into reserved, protected and unclassed forests, and the first two together are described as the permanent forest estate, that is land maintained permanently for timber and other forest produce and for the protection of soil and water.

Tropical deciduous forest is called monsoon forest because it is the natural vegetation of the monsoon climate, growing where rainfall lies between 70 and 200 centimetres and where a marked dry season follows the rains.

Red sanders, or red sandalwood, is a tree of the dry deciduous forest and grows almost entirely in the Seshachalam and Palakonda hills of the Eastern Ghats in Andhra Pradesh, where it is prized for its dark red heartwood; it is not a thorn forest species.

A block lying quietly on a table is in equilibrium, so the forces on it must add up to zero, but that does not mean there are no forces at all.