SSC MTS GK Questions 2026

Onam falls in the Malayalam month of Chingam, is kept over ten days with the chief day called Thiruvonam, and marks the harvest along with the remembered visit of the king Mahabali, with flower carpets, the sadya meal, boat races and the Pulikali dance.

Silent Valley lies in the Palakkad district on the Kunthipuzha river, a tributary of the Bharathappuzha, and the dam proposed on that river was given up after one of the best known conservation campaigns in India, after which the valley was made a national park.

Anamudi, about 2,695 metres high, stands in Eravikulam National Park in the Idukki district of Kerala, and the same park holds the largest surviving population of the Nilgiri tahr, the mountain goat of the Western Ghats.

Vembanad is the greatest of the Kerala backwaters, a brackish lagoon that runs behind the coast for a long stretch and is crossed at Alappuzha, the town called the Venice of the East, where the Nehru Trophy Boat Race is rowed on its Punnamada part.

The Periyar rises in the Western Ghats and flows west to the Arabian Sea, and it carries both the Idukki arch dam and the Mullaperiyar dam, the second of which is worked by Tamil Nadu under an old lease.

He became the first Chief Minister of Kerala in 1957, after the first assembly election held in the new state, and his ministry is remembered for its land reform and education bills.

Kerala came into being on that day under the States Reorganisation Act, which joined Travancore and Cochin with the Malabar district of the Madras State and the Kasaragod taluk of South Canara, so that the Malayalam speaking areas formed one state.

The Paithani takes its name from Paithan on the Godavari, and it is also woven at Yeola in the Nashik district.

The date was chosen because the Swadeshi Movement was launched at the Calcutta Town Hall on 7 August 1905, calling on Indians to use cloth made in their own country, and the first National Handloom Day was observed at Chennai in 2015 to honour handloom weavers.

Kota Doria is woven at Kaithoon and the villages near Kota in Rajasthan, where cotton and silk yarns are alternated to make the small square checks called khat, giving a cloth so light and open that it suits the desert summer.

Phulkari, meaning flower work, is the embroidery of Punjab, in which bright untwisted silk thread is worked in darn stitch from the reverse of a coarse handspun khaddar cloth, so the pattern fills the surface with flowers.

Kalamkari is cloth decorated with vegetable dyes, and it has two schools, both in Andhra Pradesh. At Srikalahasti the work is drawn freehand with a pen like kalam and the subjects are taken from temple mythology, while at Machilipatnam the designs are printed with carved wooden blocks.

Bhoodan Pochampally in the Yadadri Bhuvanagiri district of Telangana weaves the ikat saree known as Pochampally, in which the yarn is tied and dyed to produce geometric diamonds and squares with softly blurred edges.

Chikankari is the hand embroidery of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, worked in white untwisted thread on light cloth, with stitches that show the motif as a shadow through the fabric.

In Bandhani the cloth is pinched and tied with thread in thousands of tiny knots before it is dipped in dye, so the tied points resist the colour and appear as white or light dots in patterns of squares, waves and flowers.

The saree is named after the temple town of Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu, where it is woven from thick mulberry silk.

Muga is reared from the Assam silkworm in the Brahmaputra valley and is the only naturally golden silk in the world, used for the mekhela chador and for sarees woven at Sualkuchi near Guwahati.

Baluchari weaving takes its name from the village of Baluchar in Murshidabad and moved to Bishnupur in the Bankura district, which is its centre today.

Patola sarees are woven at Patan in Gujarat, where both the warp and the weft yarns are tied and dyed before weaving.

The Parthenon is the temple of the goddess Athena, built in the fifth century before the common era on the Acropolis, the rocky height above Athens in Greece, and it is the most famous monument of the classical Greek world.