State Exams GK Questions 2026

The IPCC was created in 1988 so that governments would have an authoritative, regularly updated assessment of climate science; its secretariat is at Geneva, and it shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

WWF has published the Living Planet Report since the late 1990s, and its central measure, the Living Planet Index, tracks the average change in the size of monitored vertebrate populations.

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species was begun in 1964 and is the accepted global inventory of the conservation status of plants and animals.

IUCN was set up in 1948 at a conference held at Fontainebleau and was then called the International Union for the Protection of Nature; its headquarters later settled at Gland in Switzerland.

UNEP was created in 1972 after the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, and the decision to place it at Nairobi made it the first major United Nations programme headquartered in a developing country, a point examiners repeat often.

NDMA is the apex body for disaster management in India, created under the Disaster Management Act of 2005 and chaired by the Prime Minister; it frames policies and plans for prevention, mitigation and preparedness.

BirdLife International is a worldwide partnership of independent national conservation organisations, with its secretariat at Cambridge in the United Kingdom, so statement 1 is correct.

This Act gave electronic records and digital signatures the same legal standing as paper records and handwritten signatures, and its amendment of 2008 broadened the provision to electronic signatures generally.

The Advanced Encryption Standard is the Rijndael cipher, designed by the Belgian cryptographers Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, which won an open competition and was adopted in 2001 in place of the ageing Data Encryption Standard.

In a key pair, whatever one key locks only the other can unlock. So a message encrypted with the receiver's public key can be opened only by the receiver's private key, which nobody else holds; that is exactly what confidentiality requires.

A digital signature is made by hashing the document and encrypting that digest with the signer's private key.

The Message Digest 5 algorithm takes an input of any length and returns a 128-bit digest.

RSA, named after Rivest, Shamir and Adleman, works with a linked pair of keys and takes its security from the difficulty of factorising the product of two large prime numbers; it is used both to exchange keys and to create digital signatures.

HTTPS is HTTP carried inside an SSL or TLS tunnel, and the port reserved for it is 443, which is why a padlock appears in the address bar when a site is reached on that port with a valid certificate.

SSL was developed by Netscape in the mid-1990s to encrypt the traffic between a web browser and a web server, and its successor, Transport Layer Security or TLS, standardised from 1999, is what actually protects websites now; the older name survives in common speech and in the phrase SSL certificate.

The defining feature of symmetric encryption is that a single shared secret key performs both operations: the sender encrypts the plaintext with it and the receiver decrypts the ciphertext with the very same key.

Symmetric encryption uses one shared secret key for both locking and unlocking data, and because it is the older and simpler of the two families it is variously called conventional, secret key or private key encryption.

The Sangai, also called the dancing deer, is the state animal of Manipur and survives only in the floating meadows of the Keibul Lamjao National Park on Loktak Lake; the festival named after it is held in late November and shows the state's crafts, cuisine, indigenous sports and the Ras…

Established in 1953 with its seat at New Delhi, it is the national academy for the performing arts, it supports festivals, archives and training, and it is the authority whose recognition decides which dance styles are counted as classical.

Mamallapuram, also written Mahabalipuram, lies on the coast south of Chennai and is a World Heritage site of Pallava rock-cut architecture; the dance festival is staged there from late December into January, with the great relief called Arjuna's Penance as its backdrop.