Static GK GK Questions with Answers – Page 33

Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya, sits on rolling grassy uplands with pine woods, waterfalls and a cool damp climate, and British officers thought the landscape resembled the Scottish highlands, so the name Scotland of the East stuck.

The red panda, a small russet mammal of temperate bamboo forest in the eastern Himalaya, is the state animal of Sikkim, and the Singalila and Neora Valley belt is its Indian habitat.

The khejri, Prosopis cineraria, is the state tree of Rajasthan and the lifeline of the desert: it fixes nitrogen, its pods called sangri are eaten, its leaves feed livestock and it gives shade without drawing much water.

Kochi in Kerala has been the leading natural harbour of the Malabar coast since the fifteenth century, when a flood opened the Kochi inlet, and Portuguese, Dutch and English traders each made it their base.

Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, on the Noyyal river near the Palakkad gap, grew into a centre of cotton spinning and textile machinery, and the concentration of mills earned it the name Manchester of South India.

Jodhpur in Rajasthan is called the Blue City because the old town below the Mehrangarh fort is painted in indigo washed blue, a habit that began with the houses of Brahmin families and spread through the lanes.

The Nilgiri tahr, a stocky wild goat of the high grasslands and cliffs of the Western Ghats, is the state animal of Tamil Nadu.

The Great Indian Bustard, known in Rajasthan as the godawan, is one of the heaviest flying birds in the world and one of the most threatened.

The sangai or Manipur brow-antlered deer is found only on the floating phumdi vegetation of Keibul Lamjao National Park in the southern part of Loktak Lake, the only floating national park in the world.

The hangul or Kashmir stag is the only Asiatic subspecies of the red deer found in India, and it survives mainly in the Dachigam National Park near Srinagar.

The chinkara, also called the Indian gazelle, is the state animal of Rajasthan. It is a small antelope of dry scrub and desert that can survive long spells without drinking, which suits the Thar, and the Bishnoi community of western Rajasthan has protected it for centuries.

The original capital at Sarnath rests on an inverted lotus shaped like a bell, and that part was deliberately omitted from the State Emblem, which begins at the abacus.

He was a freedom fighter from the Machilipatnam region of present day Andhra Pradesh who studied flags for years and presented a design to Mahatma Gandhi at Vijayawada in 1921.

His design won a public competition and the Union Cabinet approved it on 15 July 2010.

The Saka calendar was adopted as the National Calendar with effect from 22 March 1957, which was the first of Chaitra in the Saka year 1879.

Platanista gangetica, the South Asian river dolphin of the Ganga, Brahmaputra and Meghna systems, was notified as the National Aquatic Animal in 2009.

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee composed Vande Mataram in Sanskritised Bengali and later placed it in his novel Anandamath, published in 1882, where the ascetic rebels sing it.

Rabindranath Tagore's Bengali song was sung for the first time at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress on 27 December 1911.

Satyameva Jayate, meaning truth alone triumphs, comes from a verse of the Mundaka Upanishad, which belongs to the Atharva Veda.

The Flag Code of India fixes the shape of the National Flag as a rectangle whose width stands to its length as two to three, so a flag six hundred millimetres in length is four hundred millimetres in height.