State Exams GK Questions 2026

It provides that the mere discovery of a new form of a known substance which does not result in the enhancement of the known efficacy of that substance is not an invention, and therefore cannot be patented; the Supreme Court applied it in the Novartis case concerning a cancer drug.

Under the Trade Marks Act of 1999 a registration lasts ten years from the date of application and may be renewed for further periods of ten years without any limit on the number of renewals, so a brand name can in practice be protected for as long as the business…

The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights is one of the agreements that came into force with the establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1995, and it binds every member to minimum standards of protection, enforceable through the dispute settlement system of the organisation.

The World Intellectual Property Organization was set up by a convention signed in 1967, became a specialised agency of the United Nations in 1974, and has its headquarters at Geneva in Switzerland, where it administers the Paris and Berne Conventions, the Patent Cooperation Treaty and the Madrid system.

Darjeeling tea, grown on the hill slopes of the Darjeeling district of West Bengal, was the first product registered under the Geographical Indications of Goods Registration and Protection Act of 1999 after the Act came into force, and the Tea Board of India holds the registration.

Under the Copyright Act of 1957, copyright in a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work lasts for the life of the author and sixty years counted from the beginning of the year following the year of death, after which the work enters the public domain.

It replaced the Indian Patents and Designs Act of 1911 on the recommendations of the Ayyangar Committee, allowed only process patents in medicines and food at first, and was amended in 1999, 2002 and 2005 to meet the obligations India accepted at the World Trade Organization.

Under the Patents Act of 1970 as amended, a patent in India runs for twenty years from the date of filing of the application, a term fixed in line with the minimum standard laid down by the TRIPS agreement of the World Trade Organization, and renewal fees must be paid…

The Galapagos Islands are a volcanic archipelago in the eastern Pacific, about a thousand kilometres west of the South American coast, and they form a province of Ecuador; the finches, tortoises and iguanas Charles Darwin observed there in 1835 led him towards the theory of natural selection, and the group…

Lakshadweep in the Arabian Sea is made up of coral atolls, reefs and submerged banks built by colonies of coral polyps in warm, shallow and clear tropical water, which is why the islands are low, flat and ringed by lagoons, with Kavaratti as the capital.

Indira Point lies at the southern tip of Great Nicobar, the largest island of the Nicobar group, and is the southernmost point of the territory of India; it was earlier called Pygmalion Point and was renamed, and it subsided during the earthquake and tsunami of December 2004.

Honshu is the largest and most populous of the four main islands of the Japanese archipelago and carries Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Mount Fuji, so the political and industrial heart of Japan lies on it.

Borneo, the third largest island in the world, is divided between the Indonesian provinces of Kalimantan in the south, the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak in the north, and the small sultanate of Brunei on the northern coast, and it is the only large island shared by three countries.

The Mozambique Channel is the arm of the Indian Ocean that lies between Madagascar and the coast of Mozambique on the African mainland, and Madagascar itself is a continental island that broke away from Africa and later from India, which is why its wildlife is so distinctive.

The Ten Degree Channel runs along the tenth parallel of north latitude across the Bay of Bengal and separates the Andaman group in the north from the Nicobar group in the south, which is why the Union Territory is named for both groups.

Barren Island in the Andaman group of the Bay of Bengal carries the only active volcano in India and indeed in South Asia, part of the volcanic arc produced where the Indian plate dips beneath the Burma plate, and it has erupted several times in recent decades.

Majuli lies in the Brahmaputra in Assam, formed by silt deposited by the river and its tributaries, is a seat of the Vaishnava satras founded in the tradition of Srimanta Sankardeva, and has been constituted a district of Assam, the first river island district in the country.

Indonesia is a chain of more than seventeen thousand islands stretching along the equator between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, with Java, Sumatra, Sulawesi and the Indonesian halves of Borneo and New Guinea as its principal members, and it is the largest archipelago in the world.

Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark lying between the North Atlantic and the Arctic Ocean, is the largest island on earth, most of it covered by an ice sheet, and it is a continental island separated from the North American landmass.

The potato is Solanum tuberosum, and the epithet tuberosum points to the tuber, a swollen underground stem rather than a root, which is the part eaten; the plant belongs to the nightshade family and reached India through the Portuguese.