Railway GK Questions 2026

Wegener held that about two hundred and fifty million years ago all the land of the earth lay together as one mass, Pangaea, and that one enormous ocean, Panthalassa, surrounded it.

Wegener, a German meteorologist and climatologist, put forward the continental drift theory in 1912 and developed it in his book The Origin of Continents and Oceans; he argued that all the continents once formed a single landmass, Pangaea, which broke up about two hundred million years ago.

Sphagnum is a bog moss, a bryophyte, whose dead cells hold many times their own weight of water; in waterlogged and acidic bogs its remains decay only partly and pile up as peat, which is cut, dried and burnt as fuel and is also used in nurseries to keep soil…

An angiosperm shows double fertilisation: of the two male gametes brought by the pollen tube, one fuses with the egg to give a diploid zygote, and the other fuses with the two polar nuclei of the central cell.

The word itself means naked seed: the ovules are not enclosed in an ovary, so after fertilisation the seeds lie exposed on the surface of the scales of a cone and no fruit is formed.

It is the only surviving species of its order, has remained almost unchanged for many millions of years and is known from fossils of the age of the dinosaurs, which is why it is called a living fossil; it is a gymnosperm with fan-shaped leaves, grown widely as an ornamental…

Besides its normal roots, Cycas bears small branched roots that grow upward near the surface and look like coral; these coralloid roots hold cyanobacteria such as Anabaena and Nostoc, which fix atmospheric nitrogen and supply it to the plant.

Brown algae of the class Phaeophyceae contain chlorophyll a and c along with the xanthophyll pigment fucoxanthin, and because fucoxanthin masks the green chlorophyll the plant looks olive green to deep brown; Laminaria, Sargassum, Fucus, Ectocarpus and Dictyota are examples, and many of them bear air bladders that keep the…

The green algae owe their colour to chlorophyll a and chlorophyll b, which are not masked by any other pigment; Chlamydomonas, Volvox, Spirogyra, Ulothrix and Chara belong here, and their stored food is starch.

Agar is obtained chiefly from Gelidium and Gracilaria, members of the Rhodophyceae, and it is used to prepare the solid media on which microbes and plant tissues are grown, as well as in jellies and ice cream.

Ferns and their relatives, such as Selaginella, Lycopodium, Equisetum, Pteris, Adiantum and Marsilea, are the first plants with xylem to conduct water and minerals and phloem to conduct food, and the first with a true root, stem and leaf; for that reason they are also called the vascular cryptogams.

Bryophytes such as Marchantia, Riccia, Funaria and Sphagnum grow on soil, rocks and tree trunks, but their male gametes are flagellate and must swim through a film of water to reach the egg, so fertilisation cannot take place in dry conditions.

Eichler divided the plant kingdom into two: the Cryptogamae, meaning plants with hidden reproductive organs and no seeds, which include the algae or thallophytes, the bryophytes and the pteridophytes; and the Phanerogamae, the seed bearing plants.

Decided in 1981, it held that laws placed in the Ninth Schedule before 24 April 1973, the day the Kesavananda Bharati judgment was delivered, stay protected, while those added afterwards can be examined for damage to the basic structure, a position confirmed in I.R.

The nine-judge bench held that the proclamation of President's rule in a state is open to judicial review, that the material on which it rests must be relevant, and that the majority of a government must be tested on the floor of the legislative assembly rather than assessed in the…

In Vishaka v State of Rajasthan the court, acting because there was no statute on the subject, framed binding guidelines for employers, including complaints committees, and these guidelines governed workplaces until Parliament enacted a law on the prevention, prohibition and redressal of such harassment in 2013.

Puttaswamy v Union of India. A bench of nine judges held unanimously in 2017 that the right to privacy is intrinsic to life and personal liberty under Article 21 and to the freedoms guaranteed by Part III, and it overruled the older view taken in the M.P.

Decided in 1992 by a nine-judge bench, it upheld reservation in central services for other backward classes, fixed an ordinary ceiling of fifty per cent on total reservation and directed that the better off among the backward classes, the creamy layer, be kept out.

In the case known as the Fourth Judges Case the court held by four to one that the commission would let the executive influence the appointment of judges, that the independence of the judiciary is part of the basic structure, and that the collegium therefore revived.

That amendment had added clauses to Article 368 declaring that an amendment could not be questioned in any court and that there was no limit on the amending power; the court held those clauses void because judicial review and the balance between fundamental rights and directive principles are part of…