State Exams GK Questions 2026

India's first satellite was named after the ancient astronomer and mathematician Aryabhata, was built by the Indian Space Research Organisation and was launched in April 1975 from the Soviet Union, since India had no launch vehicle of its own at the time; it carried experiments in X-ray astronomy and solar…

It is a spiral galaxy of a few hundred billion stars, and the solar system lies in one of its spiral arms, far from the centre, which is why we see the galaxy edge on as a milky band across the night sky.

It appears brightest because it is both luminous and close, about 8.6 light years away, and it is in fact a binary system with a white dwarf companion.

A geostationary satellite is placed in a circular orbit about 35,786 kilometres above the equator, where its period of revolution equals the period of rotation of the earth about its axis, and it moves from west to east like the earth, so it appears to stay over the same point…

Being a red dwarf it cannot be seen with the naked eye, although it is the closest star to us after the Sun.

A light year is the distance travelled by light in vacuum in one year, which is about 9.46 times ten to the power twelve kilometres, or roughly nine and a half trillion kilometres.

A satellite is given the required height and speed by its launch vehicle, and after that no engine is needed: the gravitational pull of the earth alone acts on it and provides the centripetal force that keeps it in a curved path, so the satellite keeps falling towards the earth…

A star is so far away that it is a point source of light.

In the core of the Sun, at a temperature of about fifteen million kelvin, four hydrogen nuclei combine through the proton-proton chain to form one helium nucleus.

A Standing Committee of the Inter-State Council was constituted in 1996 for continuous consultation between the Centre and the States, and it is chaired by the Union Home Minister while the Council itself is chaired by the Prime Minister.

It opens Part XIII of the Constitution and makes India a single economic unit by declaring the freedom of trade, commerce and intercourse throughout the territory of India, subject to the restrictions permitted by Articles 302 to 305.

It allows Parliament to provide by law for the adjudication of disputes over the waters of inter-State rivers and river valleys, and its second clause allows Parliament to bar the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and of every other court in such a dispute.

The north-eastern States were not placed in any of the five Zonal Councils, so Parliament gave them their own body by this Act, with headquarters at Shillong; Sikkim was added as a member in 2002.

Appointed in 1983 under Justice R. S. Sarkaria to review Centre-State relations, it submitted its report in 1988 and pressed for a permanent Inter-State Council under Article 263; the Council was created by a presidential order in 1990.

This article makes the public acts, records and judicial proceedings of the Union and of every State valid and provable everywhere in India, and it declares that the final judgments and orders of civil courts in any part of India may be executed anywhere in the country.

The Southern Zonal Council consists of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu along with the Union Territory of Puducherry, and its headquarters is at Chennai.

The States Reorganisation Act makes the Union Home Minister the common chairman of all five Zonal Councils, so that the Centre and the States of a zone meet under one presiding officer.

The five Zonal Councils were set up by this Act, which also reorganised the States on a linguistic basis, and they are therefore statutory bodies rather than constitutional ones.

Article 263 empowers the President to establish by order an Inter-State Council if it appears to him that the public interest would be served by it, and it lists the Council duties: inquiring into and advising upon disputes between States, investigating and discussing subjects of common interest to the Union…

The League of Nations, proposed in the Fourteen Points of President Woodrow Wilson and created under the Treaty of Versailles, began work in 1920 with its headquarters at Geneva in Switzerland; it failed to stop aggression in Manchuria, Abyssinia and Europe and was replaced by the United Nations in 1945.