RRB Group D GK Questions 2026

Founded as Byzantium, the city became Constantinople as the capital of the eastern Roman empire and was officially renamed Istanbul in 1930; it straddles the Bosphorus and so lies partly in Europe and partly in Asia.

The small southern African monarchy announced the change in 2018 on the fiftieth anniversary of its independence, the new name meaning the land of the Swazi in the Swati language, and it is now listed at the United Nations as the Kingdom of Eswatini.

Northern Rhodesia became Zambia on independence in 1964 and Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980, the new name being taken from the stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe.

The correct answer is B, Burkina Faso, which was called Upper Volta after the branches of the river Volta that cross it and took its present name in 1984; the new name is drawn from two of its own languages and is read as the land of upright people.

The British colony of the Gold Coast, named for the gold traded from its shore, became independent in 1957 under the name Ghana, which was taken from a medieval West African empire, and it was the first colony of sub-Saharan Africa to win its freedom.

The correct answer is C, 1972, the year the island became a republic and took the name Sri Lanka in place of Ceylon.

The kingdom was called Siam until 1939, when it took the name Thailand, understood as the land of the free, a name that fits the fact that it is the one country of South-East Asia never ruled by a European power.

The correct answer is A, Aspergillus niger, a fungus grown on a sugar medium to make most of the world's citric acid, which is used in soft drinks, food and medicines.

The short, sharp heating kills the disease-causing and most spoilage microbes while leaving the taste and most of the food value of the milk unchanged, which is exactly what boiling does not do.

A virus has heredity and mutates like a living thing, yet it has no cell, no metabolism and no means of reproduction of its own; outside a host it is an inert particle that can even be crystallised, as W. M. Stanley showed with the tobacco mosaic virus in 1935…

It spreads through droplets in the air, chiefly attacks the lungs, and is treated with a long and uninterrupted course of several antibiotics.

The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae ferments the sugars of the dough into ethanol and carbon dioxide, and the gas, trapped in the gluten, makes the dough rise and leaves the bread spongy; the alcohol evaporates during baking.

Fungi are eukaryotes with a true nucleus, and their wall is built of chitin, the same tough polysaccharide that forms the exoskeleton of insects and crustaceans.

It lives in a symbiotic relationship inside the nodules on the roots of gram, pea, groundnut and other legumes, converting atmospheric nitrogen into compounds the plant can absorb while drawing its food from the plant.

The correct answer is B, measles, a viral disease spread by droplets, which is why it is prevented by vaccination and not treated with antibiotics.

It is the target of penicillin, which blocks its formation, and the amount of it in the wall is what makes a bacterium stain Gram-positive or Gram-negative.

Malaria is caused by the protozoan parasite Plasmodium, of which several species infect human beings, and it is transmitted by the bite of an infected female Anopheles mosquito, the male feeding on plant juices.

He noticed that a mould of the genus Penicillium growing by accident on a culture plate had stopped the growth of Staphylococcus around it, and Howard Florey and Ernst Chain later turned that observation into a usable drug, the three sharing the Nobel Prize.

This bacterium ferments the lactose of milk into lactic acid, and the acid makes the milk protein coagulate, which is why a spoonful of old curd added to warm milk sets the whole vessel.

Sudbury in Ontario, Canada, works a nickel and copper deposit of the Canadian Shield formed in an ancient impact structure, and it is the first name in any question on nickel, with Norilsk in Russia and New Caledonia in the Pacific as the others.