SSC CHSL GK Questions 2026

In October 1962 American aerial photographs revealed Soviet missile sites under construction in Cuba; President John F. Kennedy ordered a naval quarantine of the island and, after thirteen days, Nikita Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles, the United States undertaking not to invade Cuba.

The wall was opened and began to be broken up on 9 November 1989, the single most memorable image of the end of the Cold War.

The Gold Coast became independent as Ghana on 6 March 1957 under Kwame Nkrumah, the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to do so, and Nkrumah became a leading voice of pan-Africanism and a founder of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Krishna Menon, India's best known diplomat of the period and later Defence Minister, is credited with coining the expression non-alignment in a United Nations speech in 1953; he is also remembered for the longest speech ever made at the Security Council, on Kashmir.

The five principles were written into the preamble of the agreement on trade and intercourse between India and the Tibet region of China, signed on 29 April 1954 by Jawaharlal Nehru and Zhou Enlai.

The first summit of non-aligned countries met at Belgrade, then the capital of Yugoslavia, in September 1961, with twenty-five participating countries, and Jawaharlal Nehru, Josip Broz Tito, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Sukarno and Kwame Nkrumah are regarded as the movement's founders.

The Asian-African Conference met at Bandung in Indonesia in April 1955 with twenty-nine newly independent countries, condemned colonialism and racialism, and endorsed the principles of peaceful coexistence; it is often called the forerunner of the Non-Aligned Movement.

The Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance was signed in the Polish capital on 14 May 1955, which is why the alliance carries that city's name, although its forces were commanded from Moscow.

The North Atlantic Treaty was signed at Washington on 4 April 1949 by twelve countries, during the Berlin blockade, and bound its members to treat an attack on one as an attack on all.

Churchill, by then out of office, spoke at Westminster College in Fulton on 5 March 1946 and said that an iron curtain had descended across the continent from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.

Bolivia, fighting alongside Peru, was defeated by Chile and lost the nitrate-rich Atacama coast, so that it has had no access to the Pacific since; the dispute still colours relations between the two countries, and Bolivia observes a Day of the Sea every year and keeps a naval force on…

The Vatican, about 0.44 square kilometres inside Rome, is both the smallest country in the world and the smallest landlocked country; it is the seat of the Pope and the smallest member of the family of sovereign states.

Lesotho lies wholly within South Africa and is one of only three countries in the world surrounded by a single neighbour, the other two being San Marino and Vatican City, both inside Italy.

Laos, officially the Lao People's Democratic Republic, is the only state in South East Asia without a sea coast; it is bordered by China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar, and the Mekong, which forms much of its western boundary, is its chief waterway and source of hydroelectric power.

Eritrea became independent of Ethiopia in 1993 after a long war and took with it the entire Red Sea coast, including the ports of Massawa and Assab, leaving Ethiopia landlocked; Ethiopia is today the most populous landlocked country in the world and routes most of its trade through Djibouti.

Bolivia and Paraguay are the only two landlocked states in South America. Paraguay has no coast but reaches the Atlantic along the Paraguay and Parana rivers, which carry most of its trade; Bolivia lost its Pacific coast to Chile in the War of the Pacific of 1879 to 1883.

Of the forty-four landlocked countries in the world, sixteen are in Africa, among them Chad, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Malawi and Lesotho; the colonial boundaries drawn in the nineteenth century are the reason so many African states were left without a coast.

Kazakhstan is the ninth largest country in the world and by far the largest with no sea coast. Its shore on the Caspian does not change this, because the Caspian is the world's largest lake and has no natural connection with the ocean, so Kazakhstan is counted as landlocked.

A doubly landlocked country is one that is surrounded only by landlocked countries, so at least two international borders must be crossed to reach the sea.

The coastal states of India, counted from the west coast round to the east, are Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and West Bengal; Gujarat has the longest coastline among them.