NDA GK Questions 2026

The First Buddhist Council met at Rajgriha soon after the death of the Buddha, with Ajatashatru of the Haryanka dynasty as its patron and Mahakassapa presiding, and it settled the Vinaya Pitaka and the Sutta Pitaka as recited by Upali and Ananda.

Bimbisara was the first great ruler of the Haryanka line of Magadha, traditionally dated from about 544 BCE, with his capital at Girivraja, also called Rajgriha.

Avanti covered the Malwa region and had two capitals: Ujjain in its northern half and Mahishmati on the Narmada in its southern half.

Of the sixteen mahajanapadas only Assaka lay in the Deccan, on the banks of the Godavari, with its capital at Potana, also written Potali.

It is a text of the Sutta Pitaka of the Buddhist canon and it names the sixteen great states of the age of the Buddha, from Magadha and Kosala in the east to Gandhara and Kamboja in the north-west.

Basic lava is poor in silica, very hot and thin, so it travels a long way from the vent before it solidifies.

The circum-Pacific belt, popularly called the Ring of Fire, runs from the Andes of South America up through Mexico, the western coast of North America and the Aleutians, then down through Kamchatka, Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia to New Zealand.

P waves are longitudinal, moving the particles of the medium back and forth along the direction of travel by compression and rarefaction.

Stromboli is a small island volcano in the Lipari or Aeolian group north of Sicily, and it has been in almost continuous mild eruption for centuries.

Mount Vesuvius stands near the Bay of Naples in southern Italy and its eruption in 79 CE buried the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum under ash, preserving them so well that they became an archaeological record of Roman daily life.

A seismograph carries a mass that stays nearly still while the ground and the frame move under it, and the relative motion is traced as a wavy line.

Barren Island lies in the Andaman Sea, to the east of the main Andaman group, and is the only active volcano in India and in South Asia.

The Richter scale, devised by Charles F. Richter in 1935, expresses the energy released at the source of the shock.

The focus, also called the hypocentre, is the point below the surface at which the strained rock ruptures and releases its stored elastic energy as seismic waves.

Secondary or S waves are transverse, so the particles of the medium move at right angles to the direction of travel.

In orbit the gravitational pull of the earth is the very force that keeps the craft curving around the planet, and the craft, the astronaut and everything inside accelerate towards the earth at the same rate.

The pressure at a point inside a liquid equals the depth multiplied by the density of the liquid and by the acceleration due to gravity.

In 1798 Cavendish used a delicate torsion balance to measure the extremely small attraction between lead spheres in a laboratory and from it obtained a value of G, about 6.674 times ten to the power minus eleven newton metre squared per kilogram squared.

A mercury barometer balances the pressure of the atmosphere against a column of mercury, which stands about 76 centimetres high at sea level.

Weight equals mass times the acceleration due to gravity, and the acceleration due to gravity on the moon is about one-sixth of its value on the earth because the moon has a much smaller mass and a smaller radius.