NDA GK Questions 2026

Plant breeding is the deliberate improvement of crops by choosing parents with desirable characters, crossing them, selecting among the progeny and multiplying the best lines; the high yielding wheat and rice varieties of the Green Revolution came from it, and modern breeding is often combined with tissue culture and marker…

Working under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, it is the apex committee under the rules of 1989 framed under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, and no genetically engineered organism may be released into the environment or used on a large scale without its clearance.

Golden rice was engineered to make beta carotene, the precursor from which the body forms vitamin A, in the edible part of the grain, and the pigment gives the rice its golden colour; the aim was to reduce night blindness among populations living mainly on rice.

He devised the polymerase chain reaction, which copies a selected stretch of DNA millions of times through repeated cycles of heating and cooling, using the heat resistant Taq polymerase, and he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it.

Approved in 2002, it is the only genetically modified crop cleared for commercial cultivation by Indian farmers, and it is grown for fibre rather than as food.

The cry genes of Bt cotton come from Bacillus thuringiensis, a soil bacterium that forms crystal protein during sporulation; the protein is inactive as eaten but becomes a toxin in the alkaline gut of the bollworm, which is why the plant resists the pest.

Kudankulam in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu uses pressurised water reactors of the Russian VVER type, supplied under an agreement signed with the Soviet Union in 1988 and carried forward by Russia.

The Jaduguda mine lies in the Singhbhum belt of Jharkhand and has been worked by the Uranium Corporation of India Limited, a public sector company set up in 1967, since the late nineteen sixties; it was the first uranium mine in the country.

On 11 May 1998 India tested three nuclear devices at Pokhran under Operation Shakti, followed by two more on 13 May, and the day was declared National Technology Day to mark that achievement along with the test flight of the Trishul missile and the first flight of the Hansa aircraft…

The test was carried out in the desert at Pokhran in Rajasthan on 18 May 1974 and was described by India as a peaceful nuclear explosion; Raja Ramanna led the team.

The second stage uses the plutonium 239 recovered from the spent fuel of the first stage as the fuel of a fast breeder reactor, with a blanket of thorium around the core that is converted into uranium 233; a breeder produces more fissile material than it burns, which is how…

Apsara went critical at Trombay near Mumbai on 4 August 1956 and was the first nuclear research reactor not only in India but in the whole of Asia; the CIRUS reactor of 1960 and the Dhruva reactor of 1985 were built at the same site, which is today the Bhabha…

Bhabha founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in 1945, became the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1948, drew up the three stage plan built around India's thorium, and led the establishment at Trombay that was renamed the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre after his death in 1966.

In a boiling water reactor, the design used at Tarapur, ordinary water is allowed to boil inside the reactor vessel itself, so the coolant leaving the core is a mixture of water and steam; the steam is separated at the top and driven straight to the turbine, without the separate…

The CANDU design, from which India's pressurised heavy water reactors descend, burns natural uranium, and natural uranium contains only about seven parts in a thousand of the fissile isotope uranium 235.

The Tarapur Atomic Power Station in Maharashtra was commissioned in 1969 with American assistance and was the first nuclear power station in India as well as in Asia; its first two units are boiling water reactors, a design used nowhere else in the country.

The Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1848 to 1849 ended with the defeat of the Sikh army at Gujrat, and Dalhousie annexed Punjab in 1849, placing it under a board of administration and sending the boy Maharaja Duleep Singh into exile.

Appointed Peshwa by Shahu in 1713, he secured from the Mughal court the right to collect chauth and sardeshmukhi in the Deccan, and the office became hereditary in his family, so that later Peshwas ruled from Poona while the Chhatrapati at Satara became a figurehead.

Chauth, from the word for four, was one-fourth of the revenue of a territory outside the Maratha kingdom, paid so that Maratha armies would not raid it and would in principle defend it.

By it Ranjit Singh and the East India Company agreed that the river Sutlej would divide their spheres, so the cis-Sutlej Sikh chiefs passed under Company protection and Ranjit Singh turned his energy westwards towards Multan, Kashmir and Peshawar.