Railway GK Questions 2026

Thursday, 4 October 1582 was followed immediately by Friday, 15 October 1582, so ten dates vanished while the sequence of weekdays continued unbroken; the correction was needed because the Julian year of 365.25 days was about eleven minutes too long and had pushed the spring equinox ten days out of…

He issued the bull Inter gravissimas in February 1582 and the new calendar took effect that October, correcting the drift that had built up in the older system and tightening the rule for leap years.

Portable Network Graphics applies the deflate algorithm, which rearranges and encodes the pixel data without discarding any of it, so the decompressed image is identical to the original, pixel for pixel; it also supports an alpha channel for partial transparency.

Blender is a free and open-source suite in which an artist builds three dimensional models, applies materials and lighting, animates them along a timeline and then renders the frames into a finished image or film; it also carries sculpting, simulation and video editing tools.

The number of colours a pixel can hold is two raised to the power of its bit depth, so eight bits give two to the eighth, that is 256 possible values.

MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, a standard of the early nineteen eighties by which synthesisers, keyboards and computers exchange messages about which note begins, how hard it is struck, how long it lasts and which instrument voice should sound.

CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow and key or black, and it is a subtractive model: the inks sit on white paper and subtract wavelengths from the light falling on it, so adding all of them together moves the result towards black.

In computer graphics the three basic two-dimensional transformations are translation, rotation and scaling.

Scalable Vector Graphics stores a picture as mathematical descriptions of lines, curves and shapes written in XML, so the browser redraws it at whatever size is asked for and the edges stay perfectly sharp.

PSD, the Photoshop Document, keeps every layer, mask, channel and adjustment separately so that the artist can go back and change any of them, which an exported JPEG or PNG cannot do because those flatten the picture into one grid of pixels.

MPEG stands for Moving Picture Experts Group, and the group defined three audio layers of rising complexity within its MPEG-1 standard; the third layer gave the file extension.mp3.

The Graphics Interchange Format, introduced by CompuServe, can store several frames in one file together with the delay between them, which is why short looping animations on the web were long made as GIFs.

JPEG is named after the committee of the International Organization for Standardization and the International Telecommunication Union that drew up the standard for compressing continuous tone photographs.

The Nigerian dramatist, poet and novelist won the prize in 1986, the first African laureate in literature, and he is remembered for plays such as Death and the King's Horseman and A Dance of the Forests.

The Swedish Academy awarded the prize to Dylan in 2016 for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition, the first time a songwriter had been honoured in the literature category, and the choice was widely debated because his words were written to be sung.

Alfred Nobel died on 10 December 1896, and the prizes have been presented on the anniversary of his death ever since the first ceremony in 1901, with the literature, physics, chemistry, medicine and economics medals handed over at Stockholm and the peace prize at Oslo on the same day.

Naipaul was born in Trinidad to a family of Indian origin, settled in Britain and drew on both worlds in A House for Mr Biswas, A Bend in the River and the Indian travel books An Area of Darkness and India: A Million Mutinies Now.

Kipling was born in Bombay, where his father taught at an art school, and his Indian years shaped The Jungle Book, Kim and the Just So Stories; he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907 and at forty-one remains the youngest laureate in the category.

The Colombian writer published One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, the chronicle of the Buendia family in the imaginary town of Macondo, and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982; his other celebrated novel is Love in the Time of Cholera.

The French philosopher and novelist declined the prize of 1964, explaining that a writer must not allow himself to be transformed into an institution and that he had always refused official honours.