SSC GK Questions 2026

Sudbury in Ontario, Canada, works a nickel and copper deposit of the Canadian Shield formed in an ancient impact structure, and it is the first name in any question on nickel, with Norilsk in Russia and New Caledonia in the Pacific as the others.

Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria grow most of the world's cocoa, on small farms under shade trees in the hot, wet equatorial belt along the Gulf of Guinea.

All three are temperate grasslands with 50 to 75 centimetres of rain, a cool moist growing season and a warm dry harvest, which is exactly what wheat needs, and all three are farmed on large mechanised holdings for export.

The Corn Belt lies in the central lowland of the United States, where warm summer nights, 50 to 100 centimetres of summer rain and deep well-drained loam suit maize, and most of the crop is fed to pigs and cattle, so the belt is also a livestock and meat region.

The rubber tree is native to the equatorial forests of Brazil, and the boom of the nineteenth century made Manaus a wealthy city.

The practice means clearing a patch of forest, burning the slash for ash, cropping it for two or three years until the soil is exhausted and then moving to a fresh patch.

The Mesabi Range in Minnesota lies on the western side of Lake Superior, and the ore is carried by lake steamer to the steel towns of the lower lakes, among them Gary, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, where it meets Appalachian coal.

Osaka, in the Kansai industrial region, became the leading cotton textile centre of Japan, helped by a humid climate suited to spinning, a good harbour, cheap labour drawn from the countryside and a large home market, and the comparison with Manchester in England, the original Cottonopolis, is standard in textbooks.

The Witwatersrand basin near Johannesburg has produced a large share of all the gold ever mined, from conglomerate reefs that dip deep underground, and the city of Johannesburg itself grew out of the gold rush of 1886.

Chuquicamata, in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, is one of the largest open-pit copper mines in the world, and Escondida, in the same desert, is the other name to remember.

Ghawar, discovered in 1948 in the eastern province of the kingdom, has been the largest conventional oil field known anywhere, and it is the field most often named in exams along with Safaniya, the biggest offshore field, also Saudi.

Kiruna lies in Swedish Lapland, inside the Arctic Circle, and works a high-grade magnetite deposit of the Baltic Shield. Its ore is carried by rail to Narvik in Norway, an ice-free port warmed by the North Atlantic Drift, and to Lulea on the Gulf of Bothnia.

Its salivary glands secrete hirudin, an anticoagulant that keeps the host's blood flowing while the leech feeds, and the same property made leeches a part of old medical practice and a subject of modern research on blood thinners.

In animals such as Branchiostoma, also called Amphioxus or the lancelet, the notochord extends from the head to the tail and remains there for the whole of life, which is why the group is treated as the clearest surviving picture of the basic chordate plan.

It belongs to the monotremes, the only mammals that lay eggs, the other being the spiny anteater or echidna. The young hatch from the eggs and are then fed on milk from the mother's mammary glands, which is why the animal is still a mammal.

Reptiles in general have a three-chambered heart, with two atria and a ventricle that is only partly divided, so that oxygenated and deoxygenated blood mix to some extent.

Bony fishes of the class Osteichthyes fill or empty a gas-filled air bladder and so hover at any depth without effort.

These are fine blind tubules that float in the body fluid of an insect and open into the gut, where they take up nitrogenous waste and pass it out as nearly dry uric acid, so that very little water is lost.

It belongs to the phylum Mollusca and the class Cephalopoda, so it is a relative of the squid and the cuttlefish rather than of any fish, and the common name devil fish came from its appearance and its eight arms with suckers.

Each cnidoblast holds a capsule called a nematocyst with a coiled thread that shoots out and injects a toxin when touched, and it is found in Hydra, the sea anemone, the jellyfish and the corals.