SSC MTS GK Questions 2026

The year 2016 was the International Year of Pulses, led by the Food and Agriculture Organization, and it drew attention to crops such as gram, arhar, moong, urad and masoor, which give protein cheaply and fix nitrogen in the soil.

The General Assembly declared 2020 the International Year of Plant Health to show how protecting plants from pests and diseases protects food supply, trade and the environment, and the Food and Agriculture Organization led the year.

The year 2024 was the International Year of Camelids, the family of animals that includes camels, llamas, alpacas, vicunas and guanacos, which carry loads, give milk, meat and wool, and support families in deserts and high mountains where little else can live.

An international year exists because the Assembly, in which every member state has one vote, adopts a resolution declaring it, usually on a proposal from one or more states.

India moved the proposal, it was supported by more than seventy member states, the General Assembly adopted it in 2021 and the year was observed in 2023 with the Food and Agriculture Organization as the lead agency.

The United Nations General Assembly declared 2023 the International Year of Millets on a proposal moved by India and supported by more than seventy countries, and the Food and Agriculture Organization led the observance; India promoted the crops at home under the name Shree Anna.

The Light We Carry is her second book, written after the memoir Becoming, and it sets out the habits and ideas she uses to face uncertainty.

Orbital, a short novel that follows six astronauts through a day of orbits around the earth, won the Booker Prize in 2024 for the British writer Samantha Harvey.

The American writer Walter Isaacson, who had earlier written the authorised life of Steve Jobs and books on Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, published his biography of Elon Musk in 2023 after following him for two years.

Spare is his own account of his life in and away from the British royal family, and the title refers to the old saying about an heir and a spare, the second son.

The South Korean writer Han Kang received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024 for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical trauma, and she is known for the novel The Vegetarian.

Shashi Tharoor, the writer and parliamentarian, wrote Ambedkar: A Life, a short life of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar; his other recent books include Pride, Prejudice and Punditry, and his earlier works are An Era of Darkness and Why I Am a Hindu.

Heart Lamp gathers short stories written in Kannada by Banu Mushtaq, and it won the International Booker Prize in 2025; it was the first collection of short stories to take that prize.

Her Hindi novel Ret Samadhi, translated into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, won the International Booker Prize in 2022 and became the first book originally written in any Indian language to do so; the prize money is shared equally by the author and the translator.

Raghuram Rajan, who was Governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 2013 to 2016, wrote Breaking the Mould with the economist Rohit Lamba, arguing that India should build on services and skills rather than copy the manufacturing path of East Asia.

Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India's External Affairs Minister and earlier the Foreign Secretary, wrote Why Bharat Matters, in which he explains India's place in a changing world order; his earlier book, published in 2020, is The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World.

The book tells the story of the Christian Medical College at Vellore, one of India's oldest teaching hospitals, and it was written by Dr. V I Mathan, a physician long associated with that institution.

Pankaj Mishra is an Indian essayist and novelist who writes on politics, history and ideas, and The World After Gaza is his book on how the conflict in West Asia is read differently in the West and in the formerly colonised world.

The Templeton Prize was instituted in 1972 by the investor John Templeton to honour work that explores the deepest questions of life and of the spirit, and Mother Teresa received the first award in 1973, six years before her Nobel Peace Prize.

It is named after Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who was the first High Commissioner for Refugees under the League of Nations and who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922.