SSC CHSL GK Questions 2026

Nobel made the dangerously sensitive liquid nitroglycerine safe to transport and use by absorbing it in kieselguhr, a porous earth, and patented the resulting dynamite in 1867; he later combined nitroglycerine with nitrocellulose to make blasting gelatin, and the fortune from these patents endowed the Nobel Prizes.

Gun powder, also called black powder, is made of roughly seventy-five parts potassium nitrate or saltpetre, which supplies oxygen, fifteen parts charcoal, which is the fuel, and ten parts sulphur, which lowers the ignition temperature and speeds the burning.

Replacing part of the soda and lime of ordinary glass with boron trioxide gives a glass whose coefficient of thermal expansion is very low, so it does not crack when heated or cooled suddenly; that is why laboratory beakers, test tubes and ovenware are made of it.

Metal oxides dissolved in molten glass absorb part of the visible spectrum, and cobalt oxide is the standard colourant for the deep blue of bottles and decorative glass, effective in very small quantities.

Cement needs one calcareous material, limestone, for its lime, and one argillaceous material, clay or shale, for its silica, alumina and iron oxide; the mixture is burnt in a rotary kiln at about 1450 degrees Celsius to give clinker, which is then ground with gypsum.

About two or three per cent of gypsum, which is calcium sulphate dihydrate, is ground with the clinker because it slows down the hydration of tricalcium aluminate, the compound that would otherwise set almost the moment water was added and leave no time to place the concrete.

Farmyard manure is the decomposed mixture of cattle dung, urine and bedding litter, and in general it carries only about half a per cent of nitrogen, along with roughly the same order of phosphate and potash.

Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are the three primary nutrients, and a fertiliser that carries two or more of them in one chemical compound is called a complex or mixed fertiliser; diammonium phosphate, which supplies both nitrogen and phosphate, and the NPK grades sold by number are the familiar examples.

Superphosphate of lime is made by treating rock phosphate with sulphuric acid, and the nutrient it supplies is phosphorus in the form of available phosphate, not nitrogen; it is therefore a phosphatic fertiliser.

The Caucasus Mountains run for about 1,100 kilometres from the eastern shore of the Black Sea to the western shore of the Caspian Sea, forming a wall across the isthmus between the two seas.

Ayodhya is not counted among the centres of the Revolt of 1857; in Awadh the rising was centred on Lucknow, the capital.

Mercury is small and very close to the Sun, so its weak gravity and the intense solar heat and wind have stripped away almost all gas; it has only a trace exosphere, which is why it is described as having no atmosphere.

The winter solstice of the Northern Hemisphere falls on about 22 December. On that day the Sun's rays fall vertically on the Tropic of Capricorn, and the North Pole is tilted away from the Sun.

Colostrum is the thick, yellowish first milk a mother produces in the first few days after childbirth.

When a magnet moves inside a coil, the magnetic flux linked with the coil changes, and this change produces an electromotive force and a current.

The Karachi Session of March 1931, presided over by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, passed the resolution on Fundamental Rights and Economic Policy.

The United Nations Security Council has fifteen members: five permanent members and ten non-permanent members elected by the General Assembly for two-year terms.

A cumulonimbus cloud is the final stage of a growing cumulus cloud. On a hot day, rising warm air forms small fair-weather cumulus.

An avalanche is a mass of snow and ice sliding suddenly down a mountain slope. It is driven by gravity acting on the snowpack, so it is grouped with landslides as a terrestrial or mass-movement disaster, not an atmospheric one.

Shipki La is the pass through which the Satluj river enters India from Tibet. It lies in the Kinnaur district of Himachal Pradesh, on the border with the Tibet region of China.