Railway GK Questions 2026

The mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on 22 December 1887 at Erode in Tamil Nadu and grew up in Kumbakonam, and although he had almost no formal training in the subject, his results on infinite series, partitions and continued fractions astonished mathematicians in England.

On 28 February 1928 the physicist C V Raman announced his discovery that light changes its wavelength when it is scattered by molecules, an effect that carries his name, and for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930, the first Nobel Prize in science won by an…

Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya was born on 15 September 1861 in Mysore state, and he is remembered for the Krishna Raja Sagara dam, the block system of irrigation gates and his years as Diwan of Mysore.

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, was born on 14 November 1889, and because of his affection for children, who called him Chacha Nehru, the date was adopted as Children's Day or Bal Diwas.

Dr Radhakrishnan, philosopher, professor and the second President of India, was born on 5 September 1888. When students wished to celebrate his birthday in 1962, he suggested that the day be kept for teachers instead, and it has been Teachers' Day ever since.

Swami Vivekananda was born on 12 January 1863 at Kolkata, and the Government of India declared his birthday National Youth Day in 1984, first observed in 1985, because his writings and his address at the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893 are held up as a model for young…

One byte holds eight bits, and each bit can be either 0 or 1, so the number of different patterns is 2 raised to the power 8, that is 256.

Hexadecimal has base 16 and therefore needs sixteen different symbols. The digits 0 to 9 serve for the first ten values, and because no single digit exists for the values 10 to 15, the letters A to F are borrowed.

The 2's complement is found in two steps. First take the 1's complement by changing every 0 to 1 and every 1 to 0; for 1010 this gives 0101.

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. In its standard form it is a seven-bit code, so it can represent 2 raised to the power 7, that is 128 different characters: the English capital and small letters, the ten digit symbols, punctuation marks and a set of control…

To convert a binary number to decimal, write the place values from the right as 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and so on, multiply each bit by its place value and add the results.

The octal system has base 8, so it uses only the eight digits from 0 to 7. The general rule is that the largest digit of any number system is one less than its base, which means the digits 8 and 9 can never appear in an octal number.

Storage units in computing grow in powers of two rather than powers of ten, because addresses are binary. One kilobyte is 2 raised to the power 10 bytes, which equals 1024 bytes.

A bit, short for binary digit, is a single 0 or 1 and is the smallest unit of data a computer handles.

The safest way to handle a binary subtraction in an examination is to convert both numbers to decimal, subtract, and convert the answer back.

To turn a binary number into octal, group the bits in threes starting from the rightmost bit, adding leading zeros to complete the last group, because three bits cover the eight octal digits.

Octal has base 8, and because 2 raised to the power 3 equals 8, every octal digit expands into exactly three binary bits.

Hexadecimal has base 16, and because 2 raised to the power 4 equals 16, exactly four binary bits make one hexadecimal digit.

Salim Ali, known as the Birdman of India, was the ornithologist whose surveys built the modern study of Indian birds, and The Book of Indian Birds is his best-known work, long used as a field guide.

Sunny Days was written by the opening batsman Sunil Gavaskar, whose nickname was Sunny, and it covers his early career including the record-breaking debut series in the West Indies.