SSC CHSL GK Questions 2026

The Buddhist text Mahaparinibbana Sutta and the Jaina tradition credit Ajatashatru of the Haryanka dynasty with two engines used in his long war against the Lichchhavis of Vaishali: the Mahashilakantaka, which hurled great stones, and the Rathamusala, a chariot fitted with a mace that swept down ranks of soldiers.

Kanchipuram in northern Tamil Nadu was the Pallava capital from about the fourth century until the dynasty fell to the Cholas in the ninth, and it was there that Hiuen Tsang was received by Narasimhavarman I and that the Kailasanatha temple was raised by Narasimhavarman II Rajasimha.

Mahendravarman I ruled the Pallava kingdom from Kanchipuram in the early seventh century, fought Pulakeshin II of Badami, began the rock-cut mandapas of the Tamil country and bore the titles Vichitrachitta and Mattavilasa, the second being the name of the Sanskrit farce attributed to him.

Vijayalaya, who founded the line of the imperial Cholas in the middle of the ninth century, captured the Kaveri delta from the Muttaraiyar chiefs and built Thanjavur, which became the Chola capital and later the site of Rajaraja I's Brihadeeswara temple.

Dantidurga founded the Rashtrakuta dynasty in the middle of the eighth century, threw off the overlordship of the Chalukyas of Badami by defeating Kirtivarman II, and took imperial titles; his successors ruled from Manyakheta, the modern Malkhed.

When the surface on which condensation occurs is below the freezing point and the dew point is also below it, the vapour changes directly into tiny ice crystals instead of water droplets, and that white deposit is frost; it is common on clear, calm winter nights when the ground loses…

A temperate or extra-tropical cyclone is a frontal system: it forms between about thirty-five and sixty-five degrees latitude where a cold polar air mass meets a warm subtropical one, and the warm air is forced to rise along the front, giving slow and widespread rain over a large area.

The India Meteorological Department grades a system of the north Indian Ocean by its sustained wind speed, and the highest grade, the super cyclonic storm, begins at two hundred and twenty-two kilometres per hour.

The Coriolis force, which arises from the rotation of the earth, is zero at the equator and very weak for a few degrees on either side, so converging air cannot be deflected into the spiral that makes a cyclone; the belt within about five degrees of the equator is therefore…

In the equatorial belt the ground is strongly heated through the morning, the warm moist air rises in powerful convection currents, cools as it rises, condenses into towering cumulonimbus and falls as a short, very heavy shower in the afternoon, which is why it is nicknamed four o'clock rain.

The cumulonimbus is a cloud of great vertical extent that can rise from near the ground almost to the top of the troposphere, and the strong updraughts inside it produce thunder, lightning, heavy showers and hail; it is the cloud of the thunderstorm and the eye wall of a cyclone…

Relative humidity compares the water vapour actually present in the air with the maximum amount the air could hold at that temperature, so it is a ratio and is stated as a percentage; air at a hundred per cent relative humidity is saturated.

A hygrometer measures the humidity of the air, and the common working form is the psychrometer, a pair of wet and dry bulb thermometers whose difference in reading is converted into relative humidity with a table.

Julia was a storm of the Atlantic basin and never approached India, so it cannot belong to a list of Indian landfalls.

The local names of the tropical cyclone are a standing favourite: baguio belongs to the Philippines, hurricane to the United States and the wider Atlantic and Caribbean region, typhoon to China and the north-western Pacific, and willy-willy to Australia.

Tauktae formed in the Arabian Sea in May 2021, intensified into an extremely severe cyclonic storm, moved north along the Konkan coast and made landfall in Gujarat, which is why it is remembered as an Arabian Sea system of the western coast.

The eye of a tropical cyclone is the roughly circular column of calm, descending air at its centre, usually a few tens of kilometres across, where the pressure is lowest, the winds are light and the sky is often nearly clear.

SAGA-220 was built by the Indian Space Research Organisation in 2011 using graphics processing units, so that pair is correct.

A supercomputer's performance is stated in FLOPS, the number of floating point calculations it completes in a second, which is why the figures appear as teraflops, petaflops and exaflops; a petaflop is a thousand trillion such operations a second.

Pratyush was installed at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune in 2018, with a companion system, Mihir, at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, and the pair was acquired to run high-resolution models for monsoon forecasting, cyclone tracks and climate studies.