State Exams GK Questions 2026

The Atacama lies in northern Chile between the Andes and the Pacific coast, and it is the driest desert in the world because the cold Peru or Humboldt current chills the air along the coast and the Andes block moisture from the Amazon side; the desert is also known for…

Lake Titicaca lies on the Altiplano plateau of the Andes at a height of about three thousand eight hundred metres and is shared by Peru and Bolivia; it is the highest lake in the world on which steamers ply, which is the exact reason it is called the highest navigable…

The Angel Falls drops about nine hundred seventy-nine metres from the Auyan Tepui table mountain in the Guiana Highlands of Venezuela and is the highest uninterrupted waterfall in the world; the local name is Kerepakupai Vena.

Aconcagua rises to about six thousand nine hundred sixty metres in the Andes in the province of Mendoza in Argentina, close to the border with Chile, and it is the highest peak of both South America and the southern hemisphere, as well as the highest mountain outside Asia.

Denali, which was earlier called Mount McKinley, stands in Alaska in the United States and is the highest peak of North America at about six thousand one hundred ninety metres; the name means the high one in the local Athabaskan language and was officially restored in 2015.

A small piece of tissue called an explant is placed in a sterile nutrient medium with growth regulators, it forms an unorganised mass called a callus and then whole plantlets, because a plant cell is totipotent, that is, able to give rise to a complete plant; the plants so raised…

The system comes from a defence mechanism of bacteria against viruses: a guide RNA takes the Cas9 protein to a chosen sequence in the DNA, Cas9 cuts both strands there, and the cell's own repair machinery then changes the sequence, so a gene can be switched off or corrected in…

This committee works under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and appraises proposals for the large scale use and the environmental release of genetically engineered organisms and products, so no transgenic crop may be grown commercially without its clearance.

The deficiency of adenosine deaminase destroys the immune system because the enzyme is needed for the normal working of lymphocytes, and in 1990 lymphocytes of a girl with this disorder were grown outside the body, given a functional gene and returned to her blood; since those cells are not permanent…

In 1983 the American company Eli Lilly put the DNA sequences of the A and B chains of human insulin into Escherichia coli, produced the two chains separately and joined them by disulphide bonds to make a hormone identical to the human one; it was sold as Humulin, the first…

The British geneticist Alec Jeffreys developed DNA fingerprinting in 1984 by studying short repeated sequences that vary in number from person to person, and the method is now used in criminal investigation, in disputes about parentage and in identifying victims of accidents and disasters.

Dolly was a sheep produced at the Roslin Institute in Scotland in 1996 by the technique of somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which the nucleus of an udder cell of one sheep was placed in an egg whose own nucleus had been removed, so the lamb carried the genes of…

The polymerase chain reaction repeats three steps, denaturation at a high temperature, annealing of short primers and extension of the new strand, so the enzyme must survive near boiling water; Taq polymerase, obtained from the bacterium Thermus aquaticus of hot springs, does exactly that and lets a single DNA segment…

Golden Rice carries genes that let the grain make beta carotene, the orange pigment that the human body converts into vitamin A, and the colour of the grain gives the variety its name; the aim is to reduce night blindness and childhood blindness in populations whose diet is mainly rice.

The genes called cry genes are taken from Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterium of the soil that forms protein crystals during its spore stage.

This soil bacterium naturally transfers a part of its tumour inducing plasmid, called the Ti plasmid, into the cells of a dicotyledonous plant and causes crown gall disease; genetic engineers disarm the plasmid, insert the gene they want and use the bacterium as a vector, which is why it is…

A restriction endonuclease recognises a short palindromic sequence in DNA and cuts both strands there, leaving sticky ends that can pair with another piece cut by the same enzyme; Hind II was the first such enzyme to be discovered and EcoRI from Escherichia coli is the most widely used.

The correct answer is B, Maharashtra, which set up its Lokayukta in 1971 and so was the first State where the institution actually began to work.

The Central Vigilance Commission Act, 2003 places the superintendence of the CBI in cases under the Prevention of Corruption Act with the Commission, a direct result of the Vineet Narain judgment, while the general administration of the CBI remains with the Department of Personnel and Training under the Ministry of…

The CBI was created on 1 April 1963 by a resolution of the Ministry of Home Affairs, and because a resolution cannot confer police powers, it exercises the powers of the Special Police Establishment under the Act of 1946, whose ancestor was the war-time body of 1941 that investigated bribery…