SSC CHSL GK Questions 2026

Elephanta, on Gharapuri island near Mumbai, is a Shaivite rock-cut group whose panels tell Shiva stories: the Trimurti Sadashiva, Ardhanarishvara, Gangadhara, the marriage of Shiva and Parvati and Shiva as Nataraja.

Hampi on the Tungabhadra in Karnataka was the capital of the Vijayanagara empire, and its Virupaksha, Vittala and Hazara Rama temples are Dravidian work of the most elaborate kind: walled enclosures, towering gopurams, pillared kalyana mandapas, the famous stone chariot and the musical pillars.

The garbhagriha, the womb house, is the small square windowless cell that holds the image of the presiding deity. Every other part of a temple is added around it: the tower rises over it, the hall stands in front of it and the circumambulatory passage runs around it.

The original capital at Sarnath rests on an inverted lotus shaped like a bell, and that part was deliberately omitted from the State Emblem, which begins at the abacus.

He was a freedom fighter from the Machilipatnam region of present day Andhra Pradesh who studied flags for years and presented a design to Mahatma Gandhi at Vijayawada in 1921.

His design won a public competition and the Union Cabinet approved it on 15 July 2010.

The Saka calendar was adopted as the National Calendar with effect from 22 March 1957, which was the first of Chaitra in the Saka year 1879.

Platanista gangetica, the South Asian river dolphin of the Ganga, Brahmaputra and Meghna systems, was notified as the National Aquatic Animal in 2009.

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee composed Vande Mataram in Sanskritised Bengali and later placed it in his novel Anandamath, published in 1882, where the ascetic rebels sing it.

Rabindranath Tagore's Bengali song was sung for the first time at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress on 27 December 1911.

Satyameva Jayate, meaning truth alone triumphs, comes from a verse of the Mundaka Upanishad, which belongs to the Atharva Veda.

The Flag Code of India fixes the shape of the National Flag as a rectangle whose width stands to its length as two to three, so a flag six hundred millimetres in length is four hundred millimetres in height.

The Constituent Assembly adopted the tricolour on that day, a few weeks before independence, after a committee under Dr Rajendra Prasad settled the design.

The Indian elephant, Elephas maximus indicus, was declared the National Heritage Animal in 2010 on the recommendation of the Elephant Task Force, so that its protection could be given the same weight as that of the tiger.

The State Emblem of India was adopted on the day the Constitution came into force and the country became a Republic.

That instrument belonged to Chandrayaan 1, the lunar mission of 2008, and it was the one whose data confirmed water molecules on the Moon.

After a journey of about ten months the spacecraft fired its engine and was captured by the gravity of Mars on that day.

The Mars Orbiter Mission lifted off on 5 November 2013 on this flight of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.

Chandrayaan 3 was deliberately built without one, because the orbiter of Chandrayaan 2 was still healthy in lunar orbit and could relay the lander's signals to the Earth.

The spot where the Vikram lander of Chandrayaan 3 touched down on 23 August 2023, in the high latitude region near the lunar south pole, was given this name shortly after the landing.