State Exams GK Questions 2026

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.

The lotus, declared the national flower of India, is Nelumbo nucifera, an aquatic plant rooted in the mud of ponds and tanks with leaves and flowers held above the water, and it carries a long place in Indian art and religion.

Turmeric is Curcuma longa, a rhizome of the ginger family whose yellow colour comes from curcumin, and it is well known in the intellectual property story in which a United States patent on the use of turmeric for wound healing was revoked after India produced evidence of traditional knowledge.

Bombyx mori is the mulberry silkworm, the insect reared in sericulture, whose larva spins the cocoon from which mulberry silk is reeled, and the word mori refers to the mulberry on whose leaves it feeds.

Neem is Azadirachta indica, a tree valued in Indian medicine for its leaves, bark and oil, and it is remembered in current affairs as well because a European patent on a neem based fungicide was revoked after India challenged it.

In a binomial name the first word is the genus and is written with a capital initial letter, while the second word is the species epithet and is written entirely in small letters; both are italicised in print and underlined separately in handwriting.