SSC MTS GK Questions 2026

Gross primary productivity is the total amount of energy that producers fix by photosynthesis. Plants use a part of it for their own respiration, and what remains stored in plant bodies is the net primary productivity.

In a pond the producers are phytoplankton, tiny floating plants whose total weight at any one moment is small. They multiply very rapidly, however, so over time they can feed a far greater mass of zooplankton and fish.

Bears, crows, pigs and human beings eat both plant and animal food, which allows them to occupy more than one trophic level at the same time and makes them a good example of why food webs, rather than single food chains, describe nature better.

Detritus is dead organic matter such as fallen leaves, dead bodies and animal waste. Organisms like earthworms, termites, bacteria and fungi feed on it, and they in turn are eaten by small birds and other animals.

Energy enters an ecosystem as sunlight, is fixed by green plants, and then moves from producers to herbivores, to carnivores and finally to decomposers.

They feed on dead bodies, fallen leaves and waste matter, break the complex organic substances into simple ones and release nutrients back into the soil, water and air, where plants can take them up again.

Energy is lost as heat at every transfer from one trophic level to the next, so a higher level can never hold more energy than the level below it.

It says that only about ten per cent of the energy present at one trophic level is passed on to the next, since the rest is used in respiration and other life processes and is lost to the surroundings as heat.

Green plants make their own food from carbon dioxide and water by photosynthesis, using the energy of sunlight, so they are also called autotrophs.

The British botanist Arthur George Tansley used the word ecosystem in 1935 for a unit in which living organisms and their non-living surroundings are treated together as one system exchanging energy and matter.

Dr Ambedkar, chairman of the Drafting Committee, described the Directive Principles as a "novel feature" of the Constitution.

In State of Madras v. Champakam Dorairajan, the Supreme Court struck down a Madras government order that reserved college seats by community.

The Constitution does not classify the Directive Principles, but scholars group them into three categories: Socialist (such as Articles 38, 39, 41, 42 and 43, aimed at a welfare state and economic justice), Gandhian (such as Article 40 on village panchayats, Article 43 on cottage industries, Article 47 on prohibition…

Article 50 says the State shall take steps to separate the judiciary from the executive in the public services of the State.

Added by the 42nd Amendment in 1976, it says the State shall endeavour to protect and improve the environment and to safeguard the forests and wildlife of the country.

The 44th Amendment Act, 1978 added clause (2) to Article 38, which asks the State in particular to strive to minimise inequalities in income, and to endeavour to eliminate inequalities in status, facilities and opportunities, not only among individuals but also among groups of people living in different areas or…

Originally Article 45 asked the State to provide free and compulsory education for all children until they reached fourteen, within ten years.

It says: "The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India." A uniform civil code would replace the separate personal laws of different religious communities on marriage, divorce, inheritance and adoption with one common law for all citizens.

The 97th Amendment Act, 2011 was about co-operative societies, and it touched three Parts of the Constitution.

The 42nd Amendment Act, 1976 inserted Article 43A, which asks the State to take steps, by suitable legislation or in any other way, to secure the participation of workers in the management of undertakings and industrial establishments.