SSC Previous Year GK Questions with Answers

A desert shows the largest difference between day and night temperature, called the diurnal range, because dry sand heats up quickly in the day and the cloudless, moisture-free air lets that heat escape just as quickly after sunset.

In a flow channel the water runs from the canal head down to the fields purely under gravity, because the bed of the canal is laid at a slope and the source lies higher than the land it serves.

Cleanliness was a lifelong concern for him; he cleaned latrines himself at Sabarmati and Sevagram, insisted that every satyagrahi do the same, and declared on more than one occasion that sanitation mattered more than political freedom, because a nation that could not keep itself clean would not know what to…

Overgrazing strips the protective cover of grass, loosens the surface with hooves and leaves bare soil exposed to rain and wind, so it is one of the leading causes of soil erosion in dry India, never a remedy.

Bad lands are stretches of land cut into a close network of deep gullies and sharp ridges, so dissected that cultivation becomes impossible, and they are produced when running water removes the topsoil through sheet wash that concentrates first into rills and then into gullies.

Elektron is the Greek name for amber, the fossilised tree resin which the ancient Greeks found would attract straw, feathers and bits of dust after being rubbed with fur.

Working independently in the 1830s, Michael Faraday in England and Joseph Henry in the United States showed that a changing magnetic flux through a circuit sets up an electromotive force in it, and that the effect depends on the rate of change of flux rather than on the flux itself.

Successive assessments by the Forest Survey of India have placed Madhya Pradesh first among the States in the absolute area under forest cover, a position it owes to its very large size and to the extensive teak and sal forests of the Satpura, Vindhya and Baghelkhand tracts.

It is the composite measure that puts health, education and income together in a single figure between 0 and 1, built as the geometric mean of one index for each of the three dimensions, and published by the UNDP since 1990.

At the midnight sitting of the Constituent Assembly on 14 and 15 August 1947, Nehru moved the pledge resolution with his Tryst with Destiny speech, and Dr S. Radhakrishnan, then a member of the Assembly and later the first Vice-President and the second President of India, spoke after him.

The pinna is the outer, visible flap of the ear, and its funnel shape collects sound from the surroundings. Sound gathered by the pinna travels down the ear canal to the tympanic membrane, or eardrum, which starts to vibrate.

Pit houses dug into the ground with steps leading down into them were found at Burzahom, a neolithic site near Srinagar in Kashmir.

The tiny pores on the surface of a leaf, found mostly on its lower side, are called stomata. Each stoma is a slit guarded by two bean shaped guard cells, which swell to open it and shrink to close it.

Panchsheel is the name given to the five principles that guide India's conduct towards other countries. The five are mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in each other's internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence.

Chola inscriptions use the word shalabhoga for land set apart to maintain a school. The Cholas, who ruled from Thanjavur between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries, left hundreds of inscriptions on temple walls recording grants of land, and each kind of grant carried its own name.

Popir is a folk dance of the Adi people of Arunachal Pradesh, danced by women at the Mopin harvest festival.

The north-east trade winds blow over India in the winter season, roughly from October to February.

The Bharatiya Janata Party was founded on 6 April 1980, after the Janata Party broke up. Its ancestor was the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, started by Syama Prasad Mookerjee in 1951.

The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana was launched on 1 May 2016 at Ballia in Uttar Pradesh.

Minicoy is the southernmost island of the Lakshadweep group, and it lies well apart from the rest of the archipelago.