Important Days & Dates GK Questions with Answers – Page 2

Under the Gregorian rule a year divisible by four is a leap year, but a century year is a leap year only if it is also divisible by 400.

Thursday, 4 October 1582 was followed immediately by Friday, 15 October 1582, so ten dates vanished while the sequence of weekdays continued unbroken; the correction was needed because the Julian year of 365.25 days was about eleven minutes too long and had pushed the spring equinox ten days out of…

He issued the bull Inter gravissimas in February 1582 and the new calendar took effect that October, correcting the drift that had built up in the older system and tightening the rule for leap years.

The twentieth year is the china anniversary, also called the porcelain anniversary, and it is the last of the early names before the silver jubilee of twenty-five.

A millennium is one thousand years, from the Latin mille for a thousand and annus for a year, and in Hindi it is called the sahasrabdi.

India became independent in 1947, so the completion of fifty years, the golden jubilee or Swarna Jayanti, fell in 1997.

The fortieth year is the ruby jubilee, one of the intermediate names in the table that lies between the silver jubilee of twenty-five and the golden jubilee of fifty.

Swarna is the word for gold, so the Swarna Jayanti is the golden jubilee, the completion of fifty years.

In the traditional table of anniversary names, the tenth year is the tin anniversary, the materials rising in value as the years increase from paper in the first year to silver, gold and diamond in the longer spans.

One hundred and fifty years is a sesquicentennial, the prefix sesqui meaning one and a half, so the word reads as one and a half centuries.

The seventy-fifth year of independence was observed from 2021 as the Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav, and in the scheme of anniversary names seventy-five completed years are a platinum jubilee in Indian official usage.

The diamond jubilee, the Hirak Jayanti, marks sixty completed years in the usage now standard in India, and the figure is natural because sixty years completes a full cycle in the traditional Indian calendar.

The golden jubilee marks fifty completed years and is called the Swarna Jayanti in Hindi, the name taken from the gift of gold traditionally made on a fiftieth wedding anniversary.

Twenty-five completed years are marked as a silver jubilee, called the Rajat Jayanti in Hindi, rajat being the word for silver, and the name comes from the old custom of giving silver on the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

The world governing body for chess was established on 20 July 1924 in Paris, and the anniversary is kept as International Chess Day, with the United Nations later recognising it as an international day in acknowledgement of the reach of the game and of its Indian ancestor, chaturanga.

World Music Day grew out of the Fete de la Musique begun in France, on which musicians of every kind play free in streets and public places.

UNESCO adopted World Poetry Day in 1999 to support the reading, writing, publishing and teaching of poetry and to give a hearing to small publishers and to poetry in endangered languages.

UNESCO declared this day to promote the use and preservation of mother tongues, and the date commemorates the Bengali language movement of 1952, when students in Dhaka were killed while demanding recognition for Bengali in what was then East Pakistan.

That decision, taken on 14 September 1949, was later written into Article 343 of the Constitution, and the anniversary has been observed within India as Hindi Diwas.

A congress convened by Pierre de Coubertin at the Sorbonne in Paris established the International Olympic Committee on 23 June 1894, and national Olympic committees mark the anniversary with runs and open sporting events.