Static GK Mixed Quiz: Set 2

Vini Mahajan, an IAS officer of the 1987 batch of the Punjab cadre, was appointed Chief Secretary of Punjab in June 2020, the first woman to hold the state's top civil service post since Punjab was formed in 1966.

China's capital hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008 and the Winter Olympics in 2022, which made it the first city ever to stage both.

The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched aboard Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961 and completed a single orbit of the Earth, becoming the first human being in space.

Angel Falls, in the Canaima National Park of Venezuela, is the highest uninterrupted waterfall in the world, with a total height of about 979 metres and a single unbroken drop of about 807 metres.

Minsk is the capital and largest city of Belarus, a landlocked country of Eastern Europe that shares borders with Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.

The rupee sign blends the Devanagari letter "र" (Ra) with the Roman capital "R" with its vertical stem removed, so that it reads as an Indian letter and an international one at the same time.

The Asian Development Bank has its headquarters in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. ADB was set up in 1966 to reduce poverty and fund development in Asia and the Pacific, and it lends mainly for roads, railways, power, water and urban projects.

The black francolin, known locally as kala teetar, is the state bird of Haryana. It belongs to the pheasant family, and the male is easy to recognise by its black face and breast, white cheek patch and chestnut collar, while the female is mostly brown.

The Indian Olympic Association (IOA) was formed in 1927 and was recognised by the International Olympic Committee the same year.

It was the first working satellite of the Indian National Satellite (INSAT) system, carried to orbit by the US Space Shuttle Challenger in August 1983.

The motto of the National Cadet Corps is Unity and Discipline, in Hindi Ekta aur Anushasan. The NCC was set up in 1948 under the National Cadet Corps Act, 1948, and works under the Ministry of Defence with its headquarters in New Delhi.

The Hirakud dam stands on the Mahanadi near Sambalpur in Odisha. Completed in 1957, it was among the first big multipurpose river valley projects after Independence, built to control the Mahanadi's floods and to give irrigation and hydroelectric power.

SAARC, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, has eight members — Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Kolkata earned the name City of Palaces in the colonial era for the grand mansions built by British officials and rich Bengali families along its main streets.

He had presided over the Constituent Assembly that framed the Constitution and became the first President when the Constitution came into force in 1950.

On 24 January 1950, two days before the Constitution came into force, the United Provinces was officially renamed Uttar Pradesh.

The Soviet cosmonaut flew alone aboard Vostok 6 in June 1963 and spent nearly three days in orbit, becoming the first woman in space, two years after Yuri Gagarin's flight.

The euro is the official currency of the European Union. It came into being as an accounting currency in 1999 and reached people's hands as notes and coins on 1 January 2002.

The Ministry of Panchayati Raj is a Union ministry, and like every ministry of the Government of India it works from the national capital, New Delhi.

He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for Gitanjali and was the first Asian of any nationality to win a Nobel Prize, which is a second fact worth carrying.