Railway GK Questions 2026

The Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen was born on 2 April, and the International Board on Books for Young People chose that date for International Children's Book Day; the same body gives the Hans Christian Andersen Award, often called the little Nobel of children's literature.

The Panchatantra was first rendered into Middle Persian, and from that version it was turned into Arabic as Kalila wa Dimna, the two names being those of the jackals of the first book.

The Jataka tales form part of the Buddhist canon in Pali and number over five hundred.

The Panchatantra, a collection of animal fables in Sanskrit arranged in five books, is traditionally said to have been composed by Vishnu Sharma to teach practical statecraft to the dull witted sons of a king.

These four are the oldest and most widely covered international pageants: Miss World from 1951 in Britain, Miss Universe from 1952 in the United States, Miss International from 1960 and held mainly in Japan, and Miss Earth from 2001 in the Philippines.

The year 2000 was the second time India held both crowns, with Priyanka Chopra crowned Miss World at London and Lara Dutta crowned Miss Universe at Nicosia in Cyprus; Dia Mirza also won Miss Asia Pacific the same year.

The Miss World contest of 1996 was held at Bangalore, the first time the pageant came to India, and it is remembered as much for the protests and the court proceedings around it as for the contest itself; it became a standard example in debates on the commercialisation of beauty.

Nicole Faria won Miss Earth in 2010 and was the first and so far the only Indian to take that crown.

The first Miss Universe contest was held at Long Beach in California in 1952, organised by an American swimwear company that wanted to promote its products, and Armi Kuusela of Finland was crowned the first Miss Universe.

Beauty with a Purpose is the charitable arm and the motto of the Miss World organisation, introduced in the nineteen seventies, under which contestants present social projects in their own countries and the work counts in the judging.

Manushi Chhillar of Haryana won Miss World in 2017 at Sanya in China, bringing the title back to India after a gap of seventeen years since Priyanka Chopra's win in 2000.

In 1994 Sushmita Sen won Miss Universe at Manila and Aishwarya Rai won Miss World at Sun City in South Africa, the first time India held both crowns in a single year.

Eric Morley organised the first Miss World contest in the United Kingdom in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain, intending it as a single event; its success made it an annual pageant.

Sushmita Sen won Miss Universe in 1994 at Manila in the Philippines, the first Indian to take that crown, and in the same year Aishwarya Rai won Miss World, so 1994 is the year India held both titles.

Reita Faria won Miss World in 1966 and was the first Indian and indeed the first Asian woman to hold the title.

The Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer was adopted in 1985 as a framework agreement, and the Montreal Protocol of 1987 gave it teeth by fixing timetables for phasing out ozone-depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons and halons.

India has not signed the test-ban treaty of 1996, just as it is not a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, holding that both divide the world permanently into nuclear and non-nuclear states.

The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance was signed in 1971 at Ramsar, a city on the Caspian coast of Iran, and is the oldest of the modern global environmental treaties.

The Treaty of Tordesillas was signed in 1494, two years after Columbus reached the Americas, and drew an imaginary line down the Atlantic: lands found to the west of it were to belong to Spain and those to the east to Portugal.

Signed in 1992 in the Dutch city of Maastricht and in force from 1993, it created the European Union, introduced the idea of European citizenship and set out the path to the single currency.