State Exams GK Questions 2026

Broad gauge in India measures 1,676 millimetres between the inner faces of the rails, and it carries almost all long distance traffic; the conversion of older lines to this gauge is called Project Unigauge.

The correct answer is C, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, inscribed in 1999 as the first of the three lines that together form the World Heritage property called the Mountain Railways of India.

The Vivek Express runs between Dibrugarh in upper Assam and Kanniyakumari at the southern tip of the mainland, covering roughly 4,200 kilometres, the longest route of any train in the country.

The South Central Railway has its headquarters at Secunderabad in Telangana.

The Southern Railway was formed on 14 April 1951 and was the first zone created when the old company railways were regrouped after independence.

The North Eastern Railway has its headquarters at Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, and the zone despite its name serves eastern Uttar Pradesh and northern Bihar rather than the north eastern states.

On 16 April 1853 the first passenger train in India ran about 34 kilometres from Bori Bunder in Bombay to Thane on the line of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, drawn by three locomotives named Sahib, Sindh and Sultan.

The National Institute of Virology is at Pune in Maharashtra and works under the Indian Council of Medical Research; it began in 1952 as the Virus Research Centre and it isolated the virus strain used in developing the indigenous whole virion inactivated vaccine Covaxin.

A toxoid vaccine uses the toxin of a microbe rather than the microbe itself, treated so that it can no longer harm the body but still provokes antibodies; the tetanus and diphtheria vaccines are the two standard examples, and they work because in those diseases it is the toxin that…

The World Health Organization certified the South East Asia Region, India included, as free of wild poliovirus in March 2014, three years after the last case in the country, because certification requires three consecutive years without a case.

Mission Indradhanush was launched on 25 December 2014 to reach children who had received no vaccine or only some of the prescribed doses, and its name refers to the rainbow of vaccines then in the programme.

The Universal Immunization Programme was launched in 1985 and remains the backbone of child immunisation in India, covering tuberculosis, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, polio, measles, rubella and hepatitis B, with further vaccines in selected states.

BCG stands for Bacillus Calmette Guerin, a live attenuated strain of a bovine tuberculosis bacterium, and it is given at or soon after birth under the Universal Immunization Programme to guard against severe forms of childhood tuberculosis.

In 1796 Jenner used material from cowpox, a mild disease of cattle, to protect a boy against smallpox, and the word vaccine itself comes from vacca, the Latin for cow.

Swine flu is an influenza infection of the type first recognised in pigs, and the name itself records the animal in which the virus circulates before it passes to people; once it is in a human population it spreads from person to person by droplets.

Malaria is caused by the protozoan Plasmodium and carried by the female Anopheles mosquito, and kala azar, also called visceral leishmaniasis, is caused by the protozoan Leishmania donovani and carried by the sandfly.

Typhoid is caused by the bacterium Salmonella Typhi, which spreads through food and water contaminated with human waste, and it is prevented both by sanitation and by the typhoid conjugate vaccine.

A Regional Rural Bank must lend seventy five per cent of its total outstanding advances to the priority sector, a far higher share than other banks carry, because these banks exist to serve small and marginal farmers, agricultural labourers, artisans and small entrepreneurs.

The Ninety seventh Constitutional Amendment Act of 2011 inserted Article 43B in the Directive Principles, asking the State to promote the voluntary formation, autonomous functioning, democratic control and professional management of cooperative societies.

It ended the loose half of the old dual control by placing all urban cooperative banks and multi state cooperative banks squarely under the supervision of the Reserve Bank, giving the Bank powers over their boards, their capital raising and their amalgamation, after a series of failures had hurt depositors.