Railway GK Questions 2026

The Tehri dam stands on the Bhagirathi in Tehri Garhwal district of Uttarakhand, close to the confluence with the Bhilangna, and at about 260 metres it is the tallest dam in India.

The Indira Gandhi Canal, which was called the Rajasthan Canal when it was begun, starts at the Harike barrage in Punjab, just below the point where the Beas joins the Sutlej, and runs south-west through Haryana into the desert districts of Rajasthan.

The Kaveri rises in Karnataka at Talakaveri in the Brahmagiri hills, flows through Tamil Nadu to the delta, receives tributaries from Kerala and serves the Karaikal region of Puducherry, so all four are parties.

Article 262 allows Parliament to make a law for the adjudication of any dispute about the use, distribution or control of the waters of an inter-state river or river valley, and to bar the Supreme Court and all other courts from such disputes.

The Damodar Valley Corporation was created by an Act of 1948 as an autonomous body for an entire river basin, with flood control, irrigation, power and navigation under one management, exactly on the pattern of the Tennessee Valley Authority set up in America in 1933.

The Nagarjuna Sagar dam is built across the Krishna at Nandikonda, on the border of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, and is one of the largest masonry dams in the country.

The Hirakud dam was built across the Mahanadi in Sambalpur district of Odisha, and with its earthen dykes on both flanks it is the longest dam in the country.

The Bhakra dam stands on the Sutlej at Bhakra in Bilaspur district of Himachal Pradesh, with the Nangal barrage downstream in Punjab, and the reservoir behind it is Govind Sagar.

Homi Bhabha designed the programme around the fact that India has modest uranium but very large thorium reserves in the monazite sands of the Kerala coast.

The Tarapur Atomic Power Station was the first nuclear power station in India and also the first in Asia, built with American collaboration and using boiling water reactors, unlike the pressurised heavy water reactors of the later Indian stations.

One becquerel is one disintegration per second, and it is the SI unit of the activity of a radioactive source, named after the discoverer of radioactivity.

In the core of the Sun, at temperatures of millions of degrees, hydrogen nuclei fuse in stages to form helium, and the small amount of mass lost in the process appears as energy according to Einstein's mass-energy relation.

Both absorb neutrons strongly, so pushing the rods into the core removes neutrons and slows the chain reaction, while withdrawing them allows the reaction to build up; this is how the power of a reactor is controlled and how it is shut down.

Heavy water, in which the hydrogen of ordinary water is replaced by deuterium, slows the fast neutrons released in fission to low speeds at which they are far more likely to split further uranium nuclei, and it absorbs very few neutrons in doing so, which is why Indian pressurised heavy…

Gamma radiation is electromagnetic, carries no charge and no rest mass, and therefore passes through matter far more easily than charged particles; thick lead or concrete is needed to reduce it.

An alpha particle takes away two protons and two neutrons, so the parent loses four units of mass number and two units of atomic number and becomes an element two places earlier in the periodic table; uranium-238, for instance, becomes thorium-234.

An alpha particle consists of two protons and two neutrons bound together, which is exactly the nucleus of a helium-4 atom, so it carries a charge of plus two and a mass number of four.

In 1896 Becquerel found that a uranium salt kept in the dark fogged a wrapped photographic plate, which showed that the salt emitted its own penetrating radiation without being exposed to light.

A hydrogen bomb, also called a thermonuclear bomb, works in two steps. A fission explosion of uranium or plutonium produces the temperature of millions of degrees needed to force light nuclei together, and the fusion of those nuclei then releases far more energy than the fission stage alone.

Carbon-14 is the radioactive isotope of carbon used for radiocarbon dating, and its half-life is close to 5,700 years, which is the figure quoted in the question.