SSC GK Questions 2026

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis founded the Indian Statistical Institute at Kolkata in 1931, set up the National Sample Survey in 1950, gave statistics the distance measure named after him, pioneered large scale sample surveys and pilot surveys, and prepared the plan frame of the Second Five Year Plan, which placed heavy…

National Statistics Day has been observed on 29 June every year since 2007 to mark the birth anniversary of Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis and to create awareness about the use of statistics in planning and policy; a theme is announced each year by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.

In 2019 the government merged the two bodies into a single National Statistical Office under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, so that the preparation of the national accounts and the conduct of the large sample surveys would sit in one office.

The western coastal plain is narrow, steep and submergent, so the rivers of the Western Ghats reach the sea through estuaries rather than deltas, and the drowned valleys give deep natural harbours such as Mumbai, Marmagao, New Mangalore and Kochi, besides the Kerala backwaters called kayals.

In this belt the coastal State is not sovereign, but it may exercise the control needed to prevent and punish the infringement of its customs, fiscal, immigration and sanitary laws within its territory or territorial sea.

Indira Point at the southern tip of Great Nicobar is the southernmost point of the territory of India and lies close to the equator; it was earlier called Pygmalion Point and Parsons Point, and its lighthouse subsided during the earthquake and tsunami of December 2004.

Barren Island lies in the Andaman Sea to the east of Middle Andaman and is the only confirmed active volcano in India; Narcondam, also in the Andaman group, is treated as dormant.

Chilika is a shallow lagoon on the Utkal coast, cut off from the Bay of Bengal by a long sand bar and connected to it by a narrow mouth, which is why its water is brackish; it is the largest lagoon of the country, a Ramsar site and the winter…

The Ten Degree Channel runs roughly along the parallel of ten degrees north and separates Little Andaman in the south of the Andaman group from Car Nicobar in the north of the Nicobar group.

Within this zone the coastal State has sovereign rights for exploring, exploiting, conserving and managing the living and non-living resources of the water, the seabed and the subsoil, and exclusive jurisdiction over artificial islands, marine scientific research and the protection of the marine environment.

Under the Maritime Zones Act of 1976 the territorial waters extend to twelve nautical miles from the baseline, and within them India has sovereignty over the water, the seabed, the subsoil and the air space, subject only to the right of innocent passage of foreign ships.

Its coast runs along the Gulf of Kachchh and the Gulf of Khambhat and around the Kathiawar peninsula, which gives it a far longer shoreline than any other State, and it is followed by Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

The figure usually quoted is 7,516.6 kilometres, which counts the coast of the mainland together with that of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar showed that a white dwarf, which is supported against gravity by the pressure of degenerate electrons, cannot have a mass greater than about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun; beyond that limit the star collapses further, and the work brought him the Nobel Prize in Physics in…

India's first satellite was named after the ancient astronomer and mathematician Aryabhata, was built by the Indian Space Research Organisation and was launched in April 1975 from the Soviet Union, since India had no launch vehicle of its own at the time; it carried experiments in X-ray astronomy and solar…

It is a spiral galaxy of a few hundred billion stars, and the solar system lies in one of its spiral arms, far from the centre, which is why we see the galaxy edge on as a milky band across the night sky.

It appears brightest because it is both luminous and close, about 8.6 light years away, and it is in fact a binary system with a white dwarf companion.

A geostationary satellite is placed in a circular orbit about 35,786 kilometres above the equator, where its period of revolution equals the period of rotation of the earth about its axis, and it moves from west to east like the earth, so it appears to stay over the same point…

Being a red dwarf it cannot be seen with the naked eye, although it is the closest star to us after the Sun.

A light year is the distance travelled by light in vacuum in one year, which is about 9.46 times ten to the power twelve kilometres, or roughly nine and a half trillion kilometres.