RRB Group D GK Questions 2026

In August 2021 the Government renamed the country’s highest sporting honour the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award, after the hockey player whose teams won Olympic gold at Amsterdam in 1928, Los Angeles in 1932 and Berlin in 1936.

The Dronacharya Award began in 1985, twenty-four years after the Arjuna Award, and it was the first national honour meant for coaches rather than players; the Lifetime category was added later so that a long career of coaching could be recognised separately from recent work.

Instituted in 1985, the Dronacharya Award honours coaches whose trainees have won medals at the Olympic, Asian or Commonwealth Games or at a World Championship, and it is given in two categories, Regular and Lifetime.

The Arjuna Award is the oldest of the national sports awards and honours a sportsperson for consistently outstanding performance over the four years before the award; the recipient is given a bronze statuette of Arjuna, a scroll of honour and a cash prize.

The award was instituted in 1991–92 and the chess grandmaster received it in that very first year, which is the fact papers return to most often.

He received the Dronacharya Award of 2021 in the Regular category for table tennis, the award given to coaches whose trainees reach the podium at the Olympic, Asian, Commonwealth or World Championship level.

Mendeleev arranged the elements by increasing atomic mass in 1869 and left blank spaces where his pattern demanded an element that was not yet known.

After discovering the electron in 1897, J. J. Thomson pictured the atom as a sphere of positive charge with negatively charged electrons stuck in it, a picture often compared to plums in a pudding or seeds in a watermelon.

Isotopes are atoms of the same element, so they have the same number of protons and therefore the same atomic number, but they carry different numbers of neutrons, which makes their mass numbers differ.

The modern periodic table has seven horizontal rows, called periods, and eighteen vertical columns, called groups.

John Newlands arranged the fifty-six elements known in 1866 in order of increasing atomic mass, beginning with hydrogen, the lightest, and ending with thorium, the fifty-sixth.

Henry Moseley showed in 1913, from the frequencies of the X-rays that elements emit, that the atomic number, the number of protons in the nucleus, is the more fundamental property of an element.

Electronegativity is the tendency of an atom to attract a shared pair of electrons towards itself. It increases from left to right across a period, as nuclear charge grows, and decreases down a group, as each new shell puts the outer electrons further from the nucleus.

The alkali metals are lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, caesium and francium. Each has a single electron in its outermost shell, loses it readily to form a positive ion, and therefore stands in group 1 of the modern periodic table.

The capacity of a shell is given by the formula 2n squared, where n is the number of the shell counted outward from the nucleus.

Most alpha particles passed straight through the foil, a few were deflected through small angles and about one in twenty thousand bounced back.

James Chadwick discovered the neutron in 1932 by bombarding beryllium with alpha particles and showing that the radiation produced consisted of neutral particles of nearly the same mass as the proton.

The Greek philosopher Democritus, working in the fifth century before the common era, argued that matter could be divided only up to a limit, and he called that smallest indivisible particle atomos, from which the word atom comes.

Chilika lies on the eastern coastal plain south of the Mahanadi delta, separated from the Bay of Bengal by a long sandbar, and it is the largest brackish water lagoon in the country and a Ramsar wetland famous for migratory birds and the Irrawaddy dolphin.

The Trans-Himalayan ranges, the Karakoram, the Ladakh and the Zaskar, lie north of the Greater Himalaya and belong structurally to the Tibetan block rather than to the Himalayan fold belt.