State Exams GK Questions 2026

In a boiling water reactor, the design used at Tarapur, ordinary water is allowed to boil inside the reactor vessel itself, so the coolant leaving the core is a mixture of water and steam; the steam is separated at the top and driven straight to the turbine, without the separate…

The CANDU design, from which India's pressurised heavy water reactors descend, burns natural uranium, and natural uranium contains only about seven parts in a thousand of the fissile isotope uranium 235.

The Tarapur Atomic Power Station in Maharashtra was commissioned in 1969 with American assistance and was the first nuclear power station in India as well as in Asia; its first two units are boiling water reactors, a design used nowhere else in the country.

The National Automated Clearing House is a bulk clearing service of that corporation, used for repeated credits such as salary, pension, dividend and subsidy and for repeated debits such as loan instalments and utility bills.

The Magnetic Ink Character Recognition code has nine digits, of which the first three stand for the city, the next three for the bank and the last three for the branch; it is printed in magnetic ink so that a sorting machine can read it during cheque clearing.

UPI was launched in 2016 and allows a customer to pay from a bank account using a virtual payment address, so that the account number and the IFSC need never be shared; it runs on the same immediate settlement arrangement that IMPS introduced.

This Act designates the Reserve Bank as the authority for payment systems, makes its authorisation necessary before any payment system may be operated, and provides for the Board for Regulation and Supervision of Payment and Settlement Systems.

The Indian Financial System Code is made of eleven characters: the first four letters stand for the bank, the fifth is always the digit zero and is kept in reserve for future use, and the last six identify the particular branch.

NEFT holds instructions for a short period, works out what each bank owes the others on balance, and settles only that difference; the batches run every half hour through all twenty four hours, since the service was made available on all days of the year in December 2019.

IMPS was launched by that organisation in 2010 and was the first Indian system to offer interbank transfer instantly at any hour, including Sundays and holidays.

The words in the name say it: real time means the instruction is carried out as it is received, and gross settlement means each instruction is settled by itself rather than set off against others.

NEFT is the nationwide system operated by the Reserve Bank of India for transferring funds from one bank account to another, settled on a deferred net basis in half hourly batches and available on all days of the year since December 2019.

RTGS is meant for large value payments, and the Reserve Bank has fixed a floor of two lakh rupees for a remittance through it, while setting no ceiling of its own on the amount.

The cricketer Sachin Tendulkar was named for the Bharat Ratna in 2013 and honoured in 2014, the first sportsperson to receive the highest civilian award of the country and also the youngest recipient at that time.

The Gandhi Peace Prize was instituted by the Government of India in 1995, the year marking the one hundred and twenty fifth birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, and it is given for social, economic and political change through non-violence, to an individual or an institution, Indian or foreign.

National Sports Day is observed on 29 August, the birth anniversary of the hockey player Major Dhyan Chand, who was part of the Indian teams that won Olympic gold in 1928, 1932 and 1936, and the national sports awards are conferred around this day.

The prize is named after Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, the first Director General of the Council, and is given by the Council to scientists working in India, usually announced around its foundation day on 26 September.

The Dadasaheb Phalke Award was instituted in 1969 for lifetime contribution to Indian cinema, in memory of Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, who made Raja Harishchandra in 1913, the first Indian feature film, and the first award went to the actress Devika Rani.

The Nobel ceremonies are held on 10 December every year, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel in 1896; the prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and economic sciences are presented at Stockholm, while the peace prize is presented at Oslo.

The Jnanpith Award was instituted by the Bharatiya Jnanpith in 1961 and given for the first time in 1965 to the Malayalam poet G. Sankara Kurup for his collection Odakkuzhal.