SSC CHSL GK Questions 2026

This category holds the ecologically sensitive stretches of the coast, and the notification lists mangroves, coral reefs and coral areas, sand dunes, salt marshes, mudflats, biologically active areas and the nesting grounds of turtles and birds in its sub-category CRZ-I-A, where construction is effectively barred.

The Coastal Regulation Zone notification fixes the landward limit of the regulated belt at 500 metres from the High Tide Line along the sea, and that figure has stayed the same through the notifications of 1991, 2011 and 2019.

The group that K. Kasturirangan headed reported in 2013 and used satellite imagery to separate the natural landscape of the Ghats from the cultivated and built-up land.

Its report of 2011 held that the whole range deserved protection and divided it into three graded zones, ESZ-1, ESZ-2 and ESZ-3, with the strictest ban on mining, quarrying and large projects in ESZ-1, and proposed a Western Ghats Ecology Authority to supervise the regime.

The Western Ghats were added to the World Heritage List in 2012 as a serial natural property, that is, a single listing made up of thirty-nine separate sites scattered through Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra rather than one continuous block of land.

The Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change notifies an Eco-Sensitive Zone using the power in Section 3(2)(v) of that Act, read with Rule 5(1) of the Environment (Protection) Rules, 1986, which lets the central government restrict industries and operations in an area it treats as fragile.

Apache Hive puts a table-like view over files stored in HDFS and lets an analyst write queries in HiveQL, a language close to SQL, which Hive then turns into jobs that run on the cluster, so that no Java programming is needed.

NoSQL databases drop the fixed table and row structure so that they can hold large and irregular data and spread it over many machines, and MongoDB is the best known document store, keeping records as documents in a format close to JSON.

Clustering is unsupervised because the data carries no labels: the algorithm itself groups similar records, k-means doing so by placing k centres and moving them until each record sits with its nearest centre.

ETL names the three steps through which data enters a warehouse: it is extracted from the operational systems that produced it, transformed so that formats, units, codes and duplicates are reconciled into one consistent shape, and then loaded into the warehouse tables.

It uses historical data with statistical models and machine learning to estimate what will probably happen next, such as which loan accounts are likely to slip into default or how much electricity a city will draw next summer.

Storage units climb in powers of two, each unit being 1,024 times the one below it, so 1,024 bytes make a kilobyte, 1,024 kilobytes a megabyte, 1,024 megabytes a gigabyte, 1,024 gigabytes a terabyte and 1,024 terabytes a petabyte.

The Apriori algorithm first finds the sets of items that appear together often enough to pass a support threshold, using the rule that any subset of a frequent set must itself be frequent, and then turns those frequent sets into rules measured by confidence.

In the process called Knowledge Discovery in Databases, or KDD, the stages run from selection of the relevant data, through cleaning and preprocessing, to transformation, then data mining, and finally interpretation and evaluation of what was found.

It splits a large file into fixed-size blocks, 128 megabytes by default in current versions, scatters those blocks over the machines of the cluster and keeps more than one copy of each block so that the failure of a machine does not lose data.

Virtualisation is the technique of running several logical machines on one physical machine and belongs to the chapter on cloud computing, not to the definition of big data.

On-Line Transaction Processing is the mode in which a bank counter, a railway booking window or a payment gateway works: each transaction is processed the moment it is entered, so the response to the user is immediate, and every committed transaction is written at once, so the database always reflects…

A data warehouse is exactly that, a central store into which data from many operational systems is extracted, cleaned and loaded so that it can be analysed for decision making.

The correct answer is A, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who came as Director-General in 1944 and insisted that a mound be dug layer by layer, each layer recorded in section with its pottery, so that the order of occupation could be read from the earth itself; he applied the method at…

Appointed by Lord Curzon in 1902 and Director-General until 1928, he put Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the hands of Daya Ram Sahni and R. D. Banerji, saw that the seals and bricks from the two places belonged to one unknown civilisation and announced it in 1924, afterwards publishing the great…