Railway GK Questions 2026

These are the violent evening thunderstorms of the months before the monsoon in West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand and Assam, and the name means the calamity of the month of Baisakh because the squalls can flatten huts and trees.

Mawsynram lies in the Khasi hills, and the neighbouring Cherrapunji, now called Sohra, stands close behind it.

The south-west monsoon normally sets in over the Kerala coast about the first of June, and the sudden heavy downpour that marks its arrival is called the burst of the monsoon.

In the Koeppen classification as applied to India, the semi-arid steppe climate marked BShw covers parts of Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and the drier interior of the peninsula, where rainfall is low but not as low as in a true desert.

An isohyet is a line drawn on a map through all the places that receive the same amount of rainfall in a given period.

The monsoon trough is the belt of low pressure that lies across the northern plains during the rainy season and guides the depressions that bring rain.

The pre-monsoon thundery showers of Karnataka are called cherry blossom showers or blossom showers because they help the coffee plants of the Kodagu, Chikkamagaluru and Hassan belt to flower.

As the monsoon retreats in October and November the wind direction reverses and air moves from the land towards the sea.

White light is a mixture of colours, and the refractive index of the glass of a prism is slightly different for each of them, being greatest for violet and least for red.

In myopia the eyeball is too long or the lens of the eye too strongly converging, so rays from a distant object meet in front of the retina and the person cannot see far objects clearly.

An optical fibre is a thin thread of glass or plastic with a core of higher refractive index surrounded by a cladding of lower refractive index.

On a hot day the air touching the road is heated and becomes rarer than the cooler air above it.

The power of a lens is the reciprocal of its focal length expressed in metres, that is P equals 1 divided by f. Fifty centimetres is 0.5 metre, and the reciprocal of 0.5 is 2, so the power is two dioptres.

A convex mirror curves outward and spreads the light that falls on it, so it always forms a virtual, erect and diminished image, whatever the distance of the object.

Rays reflected from a plane mirror diverge and only appear to come from a point behind the mirror, so the image cannot be caught on a screen and is virtual.

Newton passed a narrow beam of sunlight through a glass prism in a darkened room and obtained a band of seven colours on the wall, which he named the spectrum.

By the sign convention the focal length of a concave lens is negative, so f is minus 15 centimetres, and the object distance measured against the direction of the incident light is minus 30 centimetres.

A denser medium has a higher refractive index, and the refractive index is the speed of light in vacuum divided by its speed in the medium, so light must travel more slowly inside it.

That is the consequence of ozone depletion, a separate problem caused by chlorofluorocarbons thinning the ozone layer in the stratosphere, and it is addressed by the Montreal Protocol.

The International Solar Alliance was launched jointly by India and France at the Paris climate conference in 2015 to promote solar energy among countries that lie largely between the tropics, and its secretariat was established at the campus of the National Institute of Solar Energy at Gwal Pahari in Gurugram…