SSC CGL GK Questions 2026

Until 2010 the health, education and income indices were averaged arithmetically, which allowed a country to offset a very poor score in one dimension with high scores in the other two.

The switch was made in the 2010 Human Development Report. Gross national income was preferred to gross domestic product because it includes incomes earned abroad and sent home and excludes incomes earned in the country by foreigners, so it is closer to what residents can actually spend; and purchasing power…

It is the composite measure that puts health, education and income together in a single figure between 0 and 1, built as the geometric mean of one index for each of the three dimensions, and published by the UNDP since 1990.

The Human Development Index is built from exactly three dimensions and nothing more: a long and healthy life, knowledge, and a decent standard of living.

The Pakistani economist led the team that produced the first Human Development Report for the UNDP in 1990 and designed the index, drawing on the capability approach of Amartya Sen, who advised the work.

The UNDP brought out the first Human Development Report in 1990, with the Human Development Index as its centrepiece, and it has published the report and the index since.

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.