State Exams GK Questions 2026

The range runs roughly north to south through Russia from the Arctic coast towards the Caspian, and geographers have long used it, with the Ural river and the Caucasus, as the conventional line dividing the European part of Eurasia from the Asian part.

The Volga rises in the hills north-west of Moscow, flows across European Russia and ends in a delta near Astrakhan on the Caspian, which is a landlocked basin and the largest inland water body on earth.

Its basin lies on both sides of the Equator in central Africa, so the river crosses the line once as it flows north and again as it swings west and south towards the Atlantic.

The Atacama lies along the Pacific side of northern Chile, dried by two causes together: the Andes block moisture from the Amazon side and put it in a deep rain shadow, and the cold Peru or Humboldt current offshore chills the air so that little moisture moves inland.

The correct answer is B, the Sahara, which stretches across North Africa through about eleven countries from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea and is the largest hot desert on earth.

Aconcagua stands in the Andes in the Mendoza region of western Argentina, close to the Chilean border, and at about 6,961 metres it is the highest summit of both the Americas and of the southern hemisphere, and so the highest anywhere outside Asia.

The range runs about 7,000 kilometres down the western edge of South America through Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, and it carries Aconcagua, the highest peak outside Asia.

The White Nile comes from the Lake Victoria region of East Africa and carries a steady flow; the Blue Nile rises at Lake Tana in the Ethiopian highlands and brings the summer flood and most of the silt.

At a little over 6,600 kilometres it is the river that standard references and examination papers treat as the longest, flowing north through Sudan and Egypt into the Mediterranean Sea from two branches, the White Nile of the Lake Victoria region and the Blue Nile of Lake Tana in Ethiopia.

The fossil of Archaeopteryx carries feathers and wings like a bird together with teeth in the jaws, claws on the wings and a long tail with bones, all reptilian features, so it stands as the standard example of a connecting link in the fossil record.

The same arrangement of bones, humerus, radius and ulna, carpals, metacarpals and phalanges, is used for walking in a man, for swimming in a whale, for flight in a bat and for running in a cheetah, which indicates descent from a common ancestor and is called divergent evolution.

He held that an organ used often becomes stronger and one left unused withers, and that characters so acquired in a lifetime are passed to the offspring, the giraffe's lengthening neck being his best known illustration.

Darwin set out in that book the theory of evolution by natural selection, drawing on observations made during his voyage on HMS Beagle, among them the finches of the Galapagos islands whose beaks differ with their diet.

A person with Down syndrome carries three copies of chromosome 21 instead of two, a condition called trisomy 21, so the total chromosome number is 47 rather than 46.

A human body cell has 46 chromosomes arranged in 23 pairs, of which 22 pairs are autosomes, the chromosomes that are alike in both sexes, and the remaining pair is of sex chromosomes, XX in a female and XY in a male.

RNA carries adenine, guanine, cytosine and uracil, and the uracil occupies the place that thymine holds in DNA, pairing with adenine in the same way.

James Watson and Francis Crick published the double helix model in 1953, with two strands running in opposite directions and bases paired on the inside, using the X-ray diffraction photographs produced by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins; Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in 1962.

The correct answer is B, Wilhelm Johannsen, the Danish botanist who gave the words gene, genotype and phenotype, distinguishing the hereditary constitution of an organism from its visible expression.

In a dihybrid cross two pairs of characters are followed together, for example seed shape and seed colour, and the appearance of all four combinations in the proportion nine to three to three to one shows that the inheritance of one pair does not depend on the inheritance of the…

When two heterozygous plants of the first generation are crossed, three quarters of the offspring show the dominant character and one quarter the recessive one, because the recessive appears only when both factors in the pair are recessive.