Static GK GK Questions with Answers – Page 26

Humayun's library stood in the Sher Mandal, the small octagonal tower inside the Purana Qila in Delhi, which he used as a library and an observatory after he won back the throne in 1555.

SAARC was founded at Dhaka on 8 December 1985 by seven countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

She took office in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, in July 1960 and so became the first woman anywhere in the world to head a government as Prime Minister.

The Charter of the United Nations was signed at San Francisco on 26 June 1945, at the close of the United Nations Conference on International Organization, by the delegates of fifty nations; Poland signed a little later and so the organisation began with fifty-one original members.

The Eastern Railway zone has its headquarters at Fairlie Place in Kolkata, West Bengal. Eastern Railway was created in 1952 out of the eastern part of the old East Indian Railway and a portion of the Bengal Nagpur Railway, which makes it one of the oldest zones of Indian Railways.

The capital of Italy was called the Eternal City by Roman poets who believed the city would last whatever happened to its empire, and the Seven Hills, the Palatine, Capitoline, Aventine, Caelian, Esquiline, Quirinal and Viminal, are the heights on which the ancient city grew.

The phrase came into use among jazz musicians and racing writers in the United States in the early twentieth century and was later taken up as a tourism slogan for New York City, which is also called the City of Skyscrapers and the Empire City.

The Maharashtra city earned the title from its long list of colleges, its university and its old tradition of Sanskrit and English learning, which drew students from across western and southern India; it is also called the Queen of the Deccan.

Dhanbad sits on the Jharia coalfield, the chief source of coking coal for Indian steel plants and notorious for an underground fire that has burned for decades, and the city also holds the old Indian School of Mines, founded in 1926.

The capital of West Bengal is called the City of Joy, a name made popular by Dominique Lapierre's book, and the City of Palaces for the grand colonial mansions built when it was the capital of British India; it is also called the Cultural Capital of India.

Also written Alleppey, the town is laced with canals, lagoons and backwater channels crossed by houseboats, and the comparison with Venice is said to have been made by Lord Curzon; it is the home of the Nehru Trophy snake boat race.

The port on the Malabar coast of Kerala was the first European settlement in India and remained the chief trading harbour of the spice coast, which earned it the title Queen of the Arabian Sea; it is also the base of the Southern Naval Command and of the Cochin Shipyard.

The capital of Tamil Nadu and its surrounding belt hold a very large share of India's car, commercial vehicle and auto component manufacturing and export, which is why it is compared with Detroit, the historic motor city of the United States; Chennai is also called the Gateway of South India.

Ahmedabad in Gujarat built up a large cotton textile industry on the model of the English mill town, and the comparison with Manchester, the cotton capital of Britain, stuck; the city is also called the Boston of India and, more recently, the Textile City.

The city in western Rajasthan is built of a honey-coloured yellow sandstone that turns golden in desert light, and its living fort, the Sonar Qila, rises out of the Thar desert; the nickname belongs to the stone, not to any metal trade.

The houses crowded below the Mehrangarh fort in Jodhpur are washed in indigo blue, a colour traditionally associated with Brahmin households and also believed to keep interiors cool and repel insects, and the view of that blue sprawl from the fort gives the city its name; Jodhpur is also called…

The capital of Rajasthan, founded in 1727 by Sawai Jai Singh II, earned the name because the old walled city was painted in a terracotta pink wash, traditionally said to have been done to welcome a royal visit in the nineteenth century, and the colour is still maintained by law…

The Sardar Sarovar is a concrete gravity dam on the Narmada in the Narmada district of Gujarat, and its water and power are shared by four states, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan; the Narmada Bachao Andolan, led by Medha Patkar, grew around the displacement it caused.

The Damodar Valley Corporation was set up in 1948, the first statutory corporation of its kind in India, and it was consciously modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority of the United States, which had shown how one authority could take up flood control, irrigation, power and navigation across a whole…

The Howrah Bridge, renamed Rabindra Setu in 1965, is a steel cantilever bridge over the Hooghly connecting Howrah with Kolkata; it was opened to traffic in 1943 and its deck was riveted rather than bolted, so it is often described as having been built without nuts and bolts.