SSC GK Questions 2026

The correct answer is B, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, which instituted the award in 1987 for outstanding contribution to the protection of the environment by an individual or an organisation.

The Amrita Devi Bishnoi Wildlife Protection Award was instituted in 1994 and is named after Amrita Devi, who in 1730 at Khejarli in Rajasthan died, along with hundreds of other Bishnois, resisting the felling of khejri trees ordered by the ruler of Jodhpur, and the community has protected trees and…

The airport is also notable as the first in India built through a public limited company with participation by the state government, non-resident Indians and the public.

The ecologist Madhav Gadgil, who founded the Centre for Ecological Sciences at Bengaluru and chaired the expert panel that reported on the ecology of the Western Ghats, was honoured in 2024 for a career of research and advocacy rather than for a single project.

Barman built a network of village women known as the Hargila Army to protect the tall trees in which the birds nest and to change the local view of a bird once treated as a bad omen; UNEP honoured her in the Entrepreneurial Vision category in 2022.

Afroz Shah, a lawyer, began clearing plastic and other waste from the beach with a neighbour in 2015, and the weekly effort grew into a volunteer movement that removed thousands of tonnes of rubbish; UNEP honoured him in 2016 in the Inspiration and Action category and described it as among…

Alok Shukla, of the Chhattisgarh Bachao Andolan and the Hasdeo Aranya Bachao Sangharsh Samiti, organised the forest dwelling villages in a campaign that led the state to cancel twenty-one proposed coal blocks, and the prize followed in 2024.

The correct answer is B, Medha Patkar, who led the Narmada Bachao Andolan against the Sardar Sarovar dam and the displacement it caused, and who received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1992, becoming the first Indian to win it.

The prize was established in 1989 by Richard and Rhoda Goldman at San Francisco and first awarded in 1990, and it deliberately honours ordinary people rather than officials or researchers.

UNEP was set up in 1972 following the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, and placing its headquarters at Nairobi made it the first major organ of the United Nations with its head office in a developing country, and still the only large one based in Africa.

UNEP was created in 1972 after the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment and has its headquarters at Nairobi in Kenya.

In the Gupta age a workshop at Sarnath, near Varanasi, carved in cream Chunar sandstone and produced the seated preaching Buddha whose hands form the dharmachakra mudra, the gesture of teaching, and whose robe clings so closely that art historians describe it as wet drapery.

Bamiyan, in the highlands of what is now Afghanistan, lay on the trade route through the Hindu Kush and was part of the wide Gandhara cultural region, along with Hadda, Begram, Jalalabad, Swat and Taxila.

The best known of them is the standing figure of Kanishka in spotted red sandstone, broken at the neck, whose inscription names him Maharaja Rajatiraja Devaputra Kanishka, and it is now in the Government Museum at Mathura.

The correct answer is C, the wheel, the dharmachakra, which stands for the first sermon delivered in the deer park at Sarnath, an event called the dharmachakra pravartana, the turning of the wheel of law.

Amaravati lies in the lower Krishna valley in Andhra Pradesh, and the other sites of the same school, Nagarjunakonda, Jaggayyapeta, Ghantasala and Bhattiprolu, are in the same stretch of country.

Besides Buddhist figures it carved the earliest known images of the Jain tirthankaras, found at the Kankali Tila mound, and the earliest images of Brahmanical deities including Vishnu, Shiva, Surya, Balarama and Kubera, along with a long line of yakshi figures.

Kanishka, the greatest Kushana ruler, is linked with both, and the Kushanas also set up royal portrait statues at Mat near Mathura.

The Gandhara sculptor treated cloth as a Roman sculptor did, with deep, heavy, naturalistic folds falling over both shoulders, and the halo behind the head is left plain.

Its sculptors worked mainly in relief on the drum slabs and railings of the great stupa, filling each panel with figures that tell a story from the Buddha's life or from the Jataka tales, and their bodies are slender and elongated, bent in the triple flexion called tribhanga, so that…