SSC CHSL GK Questions 2026

Cotton is a kharif crop: it is sown with the first showers of the south-west monsoon in June and July and picked from September onwards, because it needs high temperature, light rain and a long frost-free spell.

Only sedimentary rocks preserve fossils, because they are built up layer by layer from sediment that settles in water or on land.

Tusu Parab is the harvest festival of Jharkhand, kept at Makar Sankranti in mid-January when the winter paddy is in.

The Eighty-ninth Amendment Act, 2003 split the old joint commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes into two separate bodies.

Excavations at Lothal found graves in which a man and a woman were buried together in one pit, a custom archaeologists call couple or double burial.

Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya, sits on rolling grassy uplands with pine woods, waterfalls and a cool damp climate, and British officers thought the landscape resembled the Scottish highlands, so the name Scotland of the East stuck.

The red panda, a small russet mammal of temperate bamboo forest in the eastern Himalaya, is the state animal of Sikkim, and the Singalila and Neora Valley belt is its Indian habitat.

The khejri, Prosopis cineraria, is the state tree of Rajasthan and the lifeline of the desert: it fixes nitrogen, its pods called sangri are eaten, its leaves feed livestock and it gives shade without drawing much water.

Kochi in Kerala has been the leading natural harbour of the Malabar coast since the fifteenth century, when a flood opened the Kochi inlet, and Portuguese, Dutch and English traders each made it their base.

Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, on the Noyyal river near the Palakkad gap, grew into a centre of cotton spinning and textile machinery, and the concentration of mills earned it the name Manchester of South India.

Jodhpur in Rajasthan is called the Blue City because the old town below the Mehrangarh fort is painted in indigo washed blue, a habit that began with the houses of Brahmin families and spread through the lanes.

The Nilgiri tahr, a stocky wild goat of the high grasslands and cliffs of the Western Ghats, is the state animal of Tamil Nadu.

The Great Indian Bustard, known in Rajasthan as the godawan, is one of the heaviest flying birds in the world and one of the most threatened.

The sangai or Manipur brow-antlered deer is found only on the floating phumdi vegetation of Keibul Lamjao National Park in the southern part of Loktak Lake, the only floating national park in the world.

The hangul or Kashmir stag is the only Asiatic subspecies of the red deer found in India, and it survives mainly in the Dachigam National Park near Srinagar.

The chinkara, also called the Indian gazelle, is the state animal of Rajasthan. It is a small antelope of dry scrub and desert that can survive long spells without drinking, which suits the Thar, and the Bishnoi community of western Rajasthan has protected it for centuries.

When the government set longer term goals for the space programme in 2023, it named an Indian space station, the Bharatiya Antariksh Station, and an Indian crewed landing on the Moon.

Born at Karnal in Haryana, Kalpana Chawla studied aeronautical engineering, moved to the United States and joined NASA, flying first on the shuttle Columbia in 1997 as a mission specialist.

All Indian orbital launches, including the PSLV, GSLV and LVM3 flights, lift off from Sriharikota on the Andhra Pradesh coast, which has two operational launch pads.

China launched Yang Liwei aboard Shenzhou-5 in October 2003, becoming the third country after the Soviet Union and the United States to send a human into orbit on its own rocket and spacecraft.