SSC GK Questions 2026

Oilzapper is a consortium of oil-degrading bacteria developed by the institute and used as bioremediation: the bacteria break the hydrocarbons in crude oil and oily sludge into harmless products, which makes it a cheap, low-waste option for contaminated soil at refineries and spill sites.

The hydrogen ions released when carbonic acid dissociates combine with carbonate ions to form bicarbonate, so the pool of free carbonate shrinks.

Oil spill response in Indian waters runs under the National Oil Spill Disaster Contingency Plan, and the Coast Guard is its central coordinating agency, working with major ports, state governments, oil companies and the Navy on reporting, containment with booms, recovery with skimmers, use of dispersants and shoreline clean-up.

MARPOL is the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, adopted in 1973 and modified by the Protocol of 1978, and it is the main pollution instrument of the International Maritime Organization.

The tanker Exxon Valdez struck a reef in Prince William Sound in 1989, releasing crude oil that coated a long stretch of a cold, sheltered coastline where oil breaks down slowly, and killing large numbers of seabirds, sea otters and salmon.

Eutrophication begins with nitrogen and phosphorus from fertiliser, detergent and sewage. The nutrients feed an algal bloom; the bloom is short-lived, and when it dies the bacteria that decompose the mass consume large amounts of dissolved oxygen.

Microplastics are conventionally defined as plastic particles less than five millimetres across.

Methylmercury discharged with factory effluent into Minamata Bay entered fish and shellfish, biomagnified up the food chain and poisoned the people who ate them, producing the nervous disorder named after the bay and recognised in 1956.

Carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater and reacts with water to form carbonic acid, which dissociates into bicarbonate and hydrogen ions; the extra hydrogen ions lower the pH, and they also combine with carbonate ions, leaving less carbonate for shells and coral skeletons.

Both are enterprise resource planning packages distributed as open-source software, so the source code can be studied and modified, and both are deployed by small and medium firms that cannot meet the cost of a large proprietary suite; ERPNext is the Indian entry in the category.

Data mining applies statistical and machine learning techniques to large stores of data to find knowledge that was not asked for in advance: customer segments, associations between products bought together, trends over time and unusual cases that may be fraud.

Salesforce is the best-known customer relationship management product delivered as a cloud service, used over a browser on subscription, with Zoho from India and Microsoft Dynamics 365 among the other names in the category.

Online analytical processing answers few but complex queries that aggregate, slice and compare historical data held in a data warehouse, which is what business intelligence dashboards and drill-down reports rest on.

A contra voucher records movements that do not change the total funds of the business but only shift them between cash and bank or between two bank accounts, which is why both sides of the entry are the firm's own accounts.

After a company is created or selected, the user reaches the Gateway of Tally, from which the masters, vouchers, reports and utilities are opened; it is the screen named in question papers because every later action starts there.

A decision support system is interactive and model-based: it holds data, models and a user interface so that a manager can change assumptions, run alternatives and compare outcomes on problems that are neither wholly routine nor wholly open-ended, such as pricing a product, choosing a warehouse site or planning a…

All three are sold as enterprise resource planning suites, with modules for finance, human resources, materials, manufacturing and sales working on one shared database; Infor belongs to the same list, and Odoo and the Indian ERPNext are the open-source examples.

A TPS serves the operational level, capturing sales, deposits, bookings, issues of material and payroll entries as they happen, where accuracy, speed and reliability matter more than analysis; it is also the source of the data that higher systems later summarise.

Tally, from Tally Solutions of Bengaluru, keeps ledgers and groups, takes entries as vouchers, and produces the trial balance, profit and loss account, balance sheet, day book and stock summary without separate work; later versions added inventory, payroll and tax features, and the current line is TallyPrime.

Customer relationship management software keeps the record of every dealing with a customer or prospect, including contacts, enquiries, calls, complaints, campaigns and purchase history, and is divided into operational, analytical and collaborative CRM.