State Exams GK Questions 2026

The bald eagle has been the national bird and the central figure of the Great Seal of the United States since 1782, and the bison was later adopted as the national mammal.

It is the largest marsupial of the continent and appears on the coat of arms of Australia along with the emu, the two chosen because neither animal can easily walk backwards, which was read as a country always moving forward.

The former actress turned columnist published Mrs Funnybones as her first book and followed it with the fiction of The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad and Pyjamas Are Forgiving.

He wrote the Sangita Ratnakara in the thirteenth century at a Yadava court in the Deccan, and because it describes practice as it stood before the Hindustani and Carnatic systems drew apart, both traditions treat it as authoritative.

The sitar player wrote two books about his own life and art: My Music, My Life, an early introduction to Hindustani music written for readers abroad, and Raga Mala, the autobiography edited by his student George Harrison of the Beatles.

Besides directing, Ray wrote constantly in Bengali and in English: the essays of Our Films, Their Films, the memoir My Years with Apu on the making of Pather Panchali, the childhood recollections of Jakhan Chhoto Chhilam, the Feluda detective stories and the Professor Shonku science fiction.

The lyricist and screenwriter published the collection Tarkash earlier and followed it with Lava, for which the Sahitya Akademi honoured him in Urdu in 2013.

He is among the few figures honoured both by the film world and by the Sahitya Akademi, and the award of 2002 was for Dhuan, a collection of Urdu short stories; his poetry collections include Raat Pashmine Ki and Pluto.

His 2014 memoir runs from a childhood in Uttar Pradesh through the National School of Drama and the Film and Television Institute of India to the parallel cinema of the nineteen seventies.

The book came out in 2014 and was narrated by the actor to the journalist Udayatara Nayar, which is why it is described as an autobiography rather than a biography.

The director of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai wrote this memoir with the journalist Poonam Saxena, and its title plays deliberately on Vikram Seth's novel A Suitable Boy, which is the trap most often set with this question.

Romancing with Life appeared in 2007, timed to the actor's eighty-fourth birthday, and covers his arrival in Bombay, the founding of Navketan Films with his brother Chetan Anand, and the making of films such as Guide and Hare Rama Hare Krishna.

Muhammad Yunus built the bank on the idea that very small loans without collateral, given mostly to women organised in groups that guarantee one another, are repaid reliably, and the Nobel Peace Prize of 2006 was awarded jointly to him and to the bank.

The National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development launched the programme as a pilot in 1992, connecting savings groups, mostly of women, directly to bank branches for credit, and by the number of households covered it became the largest microfinance programme in the world.

The cap covers the repayment of all loans of the household taken together, not only the microfinance loan being considered, and the lender must assess household income and existing debt before sanctioning, which is the framework's main protection against over-indebtedness.

The framework defines a microfinance loan by the borrower's household income rather than by the size of the loan or the kind of lender, and the same definition applies to a bank, a small finance bank, an NBFC and an NBFC-MFI alike, which was the main reform the framework brought.

After the microfinance crisis in Andhra Pradesh in 2010, the Reserve Bank appointed a sub-committee of its central board under Y. H. Malegam to study the lending practices of microfinance institutions, and its report of January 2011 led to the NBFC-MFI being carved out as a distinct category with its…

A non-deposit-taking NBFC of that size is classified as systemically important, written as NBFC-ND-SI, and becomes subject to prudential norms on capital adequacy, exposure and disclosure that smaller companies escape.

The layers are the Base Layer, the Middle Layer, the Upper Layer and the Top Layer, and the regulation becomes stricter as a company moves up, so that supervision matches the risk a company poses to the system.

The Reserve Bank uses what the industry calls the fifty-fifty test: both conditions must hold, so financial assets must be more than half of total assets and the income from those assets must be more than half of gross income.