Railway GK Questions 2026

The Ramsar Convention was signed at Ramsar in Iran in 1971 and came into force in 1975, two decades before the Earth Summit, and its secretariat sits at Gland in Switzerland; it therefore has no connection with Rio.

The permanent secretariat of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification has been based at Bonn in Germany since 1999, in the same United Nations campus that hosts the secretariat of the UNFCCC, which is a useful memory link because both are Rio Conventions with their secretariats in the same…

Running water in the Chambal basin of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh has cut deep, steep-sided channels into soft alluvium, and when these channels multiply and widen the land becomes unfit for cultivation.

The ICAR-Central Soil Salinity Research Institute is at Karnal in Haryana and is the national institute for the reclamation of salt-affected soils, the use of poor quality water in irrigation, subsurface drainage in waterlogged land, and salt-tolerant crop varieties.

The Central Arid Zone Research Institute was set up at Jodhpur in Rajasthan in 1959 and works under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research.

India hosted the fourteenth Conference of the Parties to the UNCCD at Greater Noida near New Delhi in 2019, and the meeting closed with the New Delhi Declaration, in which the parties committed themselves to restoring degraded land and to working towards Land Degradation Neutrality.

Itai-itai, which means ouch-ouch in Japanese, was first recorded in the Jinzu river basin of Japan, where mine waste put cadmium into irrigation water and then into rice grown in the contaminated soil.

The day marks the anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification at Paris on 17 June 1994, and the United Nations General Assembly declared it in the same year so that governments would review progress on land restoration annually.

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification was adopted at Paris on 17 June 1994 and it entered into force in December 1996.

The question asks for the odd one out, and the heavy use of chemical fertilisers damages soil rather than conserving it: it acidifies the soil, kills soil microorganisms, leaves salt residues, and the surplus nitrate and phosphate wash into water bodies and cause eutrophication.

A shelter belt is a row or a block of trees and shrubs planted across the direction of the prevailing wind.

Sultan Mehmed the Second captured Constantinople in 1453, ending the Byzantine or Eastern Roman empire, and the city became the Ottoman capital under the name Istanbul.

Apollo 11 landed on the Moon on 20 July 1969, and Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on its surface, followed by Buzz Aldrin, while Michael Collins stayed in the command module in orbit.

The Berlin Wall, built in 1961 to stop movement from East Berlin to West Berlin, was opened and then demolished by crowds on both sides from 9 November 1989, and its fall is the symbol of the collapse of communist rule in eastern Europe.

The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth once aboard Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961, becoming the first human being in space; the day is observed as the International Day of Human Space Flight.

The United Nations Charter came into force on 24 October 1945 once it had been ratified by the five permanent members of the Security Council and a majority of the other signatories, and that date is observed every year as United Nations Day.

A Paris crowd attacked and captured the Bastille, a royal fortress and prison that stood for the arbitrary power of the Bourbon monarchy, on 14 July 1789, and that day is taken as the start of the French Revolution; France keeps it as its national day, known as Bastille Day.

The Great Depression began with the crash of the New York stock market in October 1929, remembered through Black Thursday and Black Tuesday of that month.

Little Boy was the code name of the uranium fission bomb dropped by the United States on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, the first use of a nuclear weapon in war.

The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles and formally ended the First World War between Germany and the Allied powers.