RRB NTPC GK Questions 2026

He reached India in 1615 as the accredited ambassador of James I and stayed until 1619, travelling with the Mughal court and obtaining a farman that allowed the English to trade and to set up factories in several parts of the empire.

Portugal gave Bombay to Charles II of England in 1661 as part of the dowry when he married the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, and in 1668 the King transferred the islands to the East India Company on an annual rent of ten pounds.

Wandiwash, fought in January 1760 during the Third Carnatic War, saw Sir Eyre Coote defeat the Comte de Lally, and the French never recovered their position in India.

She granted the charter on 31 December 1600 to a body formally called the Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies, giving it an exclusive right for fifteen years to trade east of the Cape of Good Hope.

He obtained the site from the ruler of Bijapur and founded Pondicherry in 1674, and it became the headquarters of the French in India, holding that position until 1954.

The Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, usually called the Dutch East India Company, was created in 1602 when the States General of the Netherlands merged several competing trading ventures and gave the new body a monopoly of eastern trade.

He reached India in 1505 as the first Portuguese Governor and held the office until 1509.

After the Battle of Buxar in October 1764, Robert Clive concluded the Treaty of Allahabad with the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II in 1765, and the emperor granted the Company the Diwani, the right to collect the revenue of Bengal, Bihar and Odisha.

The churches and convents of Old Goa, built after Albuquerque took the city in 1510 and inscribed on the World Heritage list, follow the styles that Portugal itself was using: the ornate late Gothic Manueline manner and, from the late sixteenth century, the Baroque.

Machilipatnam, also written as Masulipatnam, was the first Dutch factory in India, opened in 1605, and the English and the French also traded there; it was never a Portuguese possession.

A Portuguese fleet under Lourenco de Almeida, son of the first Portuguese Governor in India, was driven to the coast of Ceylon in 1505, and the Portuguese soon made a treaty with the ruler of Kotte and built a fort at Colombo.

Capital goods are machines, plant and equipment that are bought not to be consumed but to produce other goods, and a firm orders them only when it expects demand to grow enough to justify adding capacity.

The IIP compares the physical quantity of goods produced in a month with the quantity produced in the base year, taking a weighted average of those quantity relatives, so it rises only when more is actually made and is untouched by a change in prices.

Primary goods in this classification are the output of mining, crude oil and natural gas extraction and electricity generation, that is goods that enter production before any manufacturing has been done to them, so the category naturally carries the largest share.

The eight core industries are coal, crude oil, natural gas, refinery products, fertilisers, steel, cement and electricity, so options A, B and D are all on the list.

Fertiliser output is important for agriculture and is watched before every sowing season, but the value of the industry's production is small beside refining or steel, which is why its weight is light and a big percentage swing in fertilisers barely moves the combined index.

Refining turns crude oil into petrol, diesel, kerosene, naphtha and feedstock for chemicals, and the value of that output is so large that a shutdown at a big refinery shows up in the national figure.

The Office of the Economic Adviser, which sits in the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, compiles the Index of Eight Core Industries and also the Wholesale Price Index, and it publishes the core sector figure every month.

The eight core industries are the energy and basic material industries on which the rest of manufacturing depends, and because they make up two-fifths of the IIP their monthly index is read as an advance signal of what the fuller index will report a little later.

In 2017 the base year of the IIP was shifted to 2011-12, the item basket was refreshed to take in goods that had become important since the previous revision, and the weights were recalculated from the gross value added shares of that year.