RRB Group D GK Questions 2026

The Maharaja had hoped to stay out of both dominions and had signed a standstill arrangement, but when tribal raiders supported from across the border entered the valley and advanced towards Srinagar in late October 1947 he asked India for military help.

The Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan, had signed a Standstill Agreement in November 1947 and then delayed accession while the Razakar militia under Kasim Razvi attacked villagers.

As Secretary of the States Department he drafted the Instrument of Accession and the Standstill Agreement, travelled from court to court to collect signatures, and wrote the standard first-hand account of the episode, The Story of the Integration of the Indian States.

The Instrument of Accession was kept deliberately narrow so that a ruler could sign it without feeling that he had surrendered his state, and all other powers stayed with him for the time being.

The States Department was set up in early July 1947, weeks before independence, and Patel took charge of it as Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, with V. P. Menon as its Secretary.

It rises in the Black Forest of Germany, flows east across central and south-eastern Europe past Vienna in Austria, Bratislava in Slovakia, Budapest in Hungary and Belgrade in Serbia, and ends in a delta on the Black Sea.

The Rub al Khali, whose name is usually translated as the Empty Quarter, occupies the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula across Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, and it is the largest unbroken sand sea on earth.

The range runs roughly north to south through Russia from the Arctic coast towards the Caspian, and geographers have long used it, with the Ural river and the Caucasus, as the conventional line dividing the European part of Eurasia from the Asian part.

The Volga rises in the hills north-west of Moscow, flows across European Russia and ends in a delta near Astrakhan on the Caspian, which is a landlocked basin and the largest inland water body on earth.

Its basin lies on both sides of the Equator in central Africa, so the river crosses the line once as it flows north and again as it swings west and south towards the Atlantic.

The Atacama lies along the Pacific side of northern Chile, dried by two causes together: the Andes block moisture from the Amazon side and put it in a deep rain shadow, and the cold Peru or Humboldt current offshore chills the air so that little moisture moves inland.

The correct answer is B, the Sahara, which stretches across North Africa through about eleven countries from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea and is the largest hot desert on earth.

Aconcagua stands in the Andes in the Mendoza region of western Argentina, close to the Chilean border, and at about 6,961 metres it is the highest summit of both the Americas and of the southern hemisphere, and so the highest anywhere outside Asia.

The range runs about 7,000 kilometres down the western edge of South America through Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, and it carries Aconcagua, the highest peak outside Asia.

The White Nile comes from the Lake Victoria region of East Africa and carries a steady flow; the Blue Nile rises at Lake Tana in the Ethiopian highlands and brings the summer flood and most of the silt.

At a little over 6,600 kilometres it is the river that standard references and examination papers treat as the longest, flowing north through Sudan and Egypt into the Mediterranean Sea from two branches, the White Nile of the Lake Victoria region and the Blue Nile of Lake Tana in Ethiopia.

The fossil of Archaeopteryx carries feathers and wings like a bird together with teeth in the jaws, claws on the wings and a long tail with bones, all reptilian features, so it stands as the standard example of a connecting link in the fossil record.

The same arrangement of bones, humerus, radius and ulna, carpals, metacarpals and phalanges, is used for walking in a man, for swimming in a whale, for flight in a bat and for running in a cheetah, which indicates descent from a common ancestor and is called divergent evolution.

He held that an organ used often becomes stronger and one left unused withers, and that characters so acquired in a lifetime are passed to the offspring, the giraffe's lengthening neck being his best known illustration.

Darwin set out in that book the theory of evolution by natural selection, drawing on observations made during his voyage on HMS Beagle, among them the finches of the Galapagos islands whose beaks differ with their diet.