Railway GK Questions 2026

The correct answer is B, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian writer whose novel traces seven generations of the Buendia family in the imagined town of Macondo and became the best known work of magical realism; he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

His novel follows Pelageya Nilovna, the mother of a young factory worker, as she is drawn from fear and obedience into the revolutionary movement of her son; it was translated into many Indian languages and shaped progressive writing here.

The correct answer is B, Niccolo Machiavelli, the Florentine diplomat whose short book advises a ruler on how power is actually gained and kept rather than how it ought to be used; his name gave English the adjective machiavellian.

The correct answer is B, Homer, the Greek poet to whom both epics are traditionally credited: the Iliad on the anger of Achilles during the siege of Troy, and the Odyssey on the ten year voyage of Odysseus back to Ithaca.

The correct answer is A, Jane Austen, whose novel of the Bennet sisters, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy opens with one of the best known first lines in English; she also wrote Emma, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion.

The novel follows a poor student in St Petersburg who kills a pawnbroker, convinces himself that extraordinary men stand above the law, and is then broken by his own conscience; Dostoevsky also wrote The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov.

The correct answer is A, Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet of Florence whose long poem carries the narrator through hell, purgatory and paradise in three parts, and which helped make the Tuscan dialect into modern Italian.

Animal Farm is a short allegory in which farm animals overthrow their owner and the pigs take his place, and Nineteen Eighty-Four gave the language the words Big Brother, thought police and doublethink.

The short novel tells of an ageing Cuban fisherman who hooks a giant marlin far out at sea and fights to bring it home; Hemingway also wrote A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The correct answer is C, Victor Hugo, the French novelist, poet and dramatist whose Les Miserables follows the convict Jean Valjean through the France of the early nineteenth century, and whose The Hunchback of Notre-Dame made the cathedral of Paris a character in its own right.

The correct answer is A, Miguel de Cervantes, the Spanish writer whose tale of an elderly gentleman who reads too many books of chivalry, takes up a lance and rides out with his squire Sancho Panza is regarded as the first modern novel in Europe.

The Russian novelist set War and Peace against the invasion of Russia by Napoleon, following several families through war and peace alike, and he also wrote Anna Karenina, the other title always paired with his name.

The Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1848 to 1849 ended with the defeat of the Sikh army at Gujrat, and Dalhousie annexed Punjab in 1849, placing it under a board of administration and sending the boy Maharaja Duleep Singh into exile.

Appointed Peshwa by Shahu in 1713, he secured from the Mughal court the right to collect chauth and sardeshmukhi in the Deccan, and the office became hereditary in his family, so that later Peshwas ruled from Poona while the Chhatrapati at Satara became a figurehead.

Chauth, from the word for four, was one-fourth of the revenue of a territory outside the Maratha kingdom, paid so that Maratha armies would not raid it and would in principle defend it.

By it Ranjit Singh and the East India Company agreed that the river Sutlej would divide their spheres, so the cis-Sutlej Sikh chiefs passed under Company protection and Ranjit Singh turned his energy westwards towards Multan, Kashmir and Peshawar.

The fifth Guru gathered the hymns of his predecessors along with verses of saints such as Kabir, Namdev, Ravidas and Sheikh Farid, and completed the Adi Granth in 1604, installing it in the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar with Baba Buddha as the first granthi.

On Baisakhi in 1699 at Anandpur Sahib, Guru Gobind Singh initiated the first five volunteers, the Panj Pyare, with the ceremony of the double-edged sword and created the Khalsa, giving its members the five articles of faith and the names Singh and Kaur.

The Panditrao was the ecclesiastical head in the Ashta Pradhan, fixing the dates of religious ceremonies, supervising grants to temples and learned men, and punishing offences against religious custom.

The Third Battle of Panipat was fought on 14 January 1761 between the Maratha army led by Sadashivrao Bhau, with Vishwasrao the Peshwa's son, and Ahmad Shah Abdali, also called Durrani, supported by the Rohillas and the Nawab of Awadh.