SSC GK Questions 2026

The Junagadh rock inscription of the Shaka ruler Rudradaman I says that the Sudarshana lake, first built in the Mauryan period and improved under Ashoka, burst in a storm and was rebuilt at the ruler own cost without a levy on his subjects.

The inscription at Aihole, composed in Sanskrit by his court poet Ravikirti, praises his achievements and mentions his success against Harshavardhana, which is the only firm evidence that the ruler of Kanauj was checked on the Narmada.

He was a court poet of Samudragupta, and the prashasti he composed in Sanskrit, partly in prose and partly in verse, lists the kings the emperor uprooted in the north, those he defeated and reinstated in the south, and the rulers who paid him homage, which makes it the main…

The inscription is cut in a cave of the Udayagiri hills near Bhubaneswar in Odisha, is written in Prakrit in the Brahmi script, and records year by year the campaigns, irrigation works and patronage of Jainism of this ruler of the Mahameghavahana line.

The words were adopted as the national motto and are inscribed in Devanagari below the lion capital on the state emblem of India.

He was an officer of the East India Company mint and secretary of the Asiatic Society, and in 1837 he worked out the values of the Brahmi letters, which made the edicts of the king who called himself Devanampiya Piyadassi legible for the first time.

Its name comes from saman, a melody, and it arranges hymns, most of them taken from the Rigveda, in the form in which the priest was to sing them at a sacrifice, so the earliest Indian system of musical notes is traced to it.

In his Principles of Economics he defined consumer surplus as the difference between what a buyer is willing to pay for a good and what he actually pays, and he also gave the standard measure of elasticity of demand, which is why his name attaches to both ideas.

A duopoly is the limiting case of oligopoly in which only two firms supply the whole market, so each one frames its price and output with a direct eye on the other.

A monopoly is a market with one seller whose product has no close substitute, so the firm is the industry and is a price maker: it chooses the price and lets the market decide the quantity, or the reverse.

The market clears where the demand and supply curves cut each other, that is where the quantity buyers wish to buy is exactly the quantity sellers wish to sell; the price there is the equilibrium price and the quantity the equilibrium quantity.

A higher price covers the rising cost of producing extra units and promises a larger profit, so sellers offer more, and the supply curve therefore rises from left to right.

Elasticity is the percentage change in quantity divided by the percentage change in price; if the numerator is zero the whole value is zero, and the demand curve becomes a vertical straight line.

When only the price of the good itself changes, the buyer simply moves to another point on the same demand curve, and a move to a larger quantity at a lower price is called an extension of demand, while the reverse is a contraction.

The law of demand records an inverse relationship: at a higher price buyers take less of a good and at a lower price they take more, which is why the demand curve slopes downward from left to right.

Robert Giffen observed that when the price of a cheap staple such as coarse bread fell, poor families did not buy more of it but less, because the saving let them shift to a better food; such inferior goods are therefore called Giffen goods and their demand curve slopes upward.

This form, analysed by Edward Chamberlin, keeps two features of perfect competition, a large number of firms and free entry and exit, but drops the third: each firm sells a differentiated or branded product, so it faces a downward sloping demand curve and has a little control over its own…

An oligopoly is a market in which a few large firms supply the whole output, so each must watch how the others will react to its price, and the cigarette industry is the standard example because a handful of companies hold almost the entire market.

Perfect competition assumes a homogeneous product, very many buyers and sellers, perfect knowledge and free entry and exit, and the visible result of all this is a single ruling price: the same good cannot sell at two prices at the same moment, because any buyer would move to the cheaper…

Selvas is the name given to the equatorial rainforest of the Amazon basin, a multi storeyed evergreen forest of hardwoods such as mahogany, ebony and rosewood, with so many species mixed together that commercial logging of a single kind is difficult.