State Exams GK Questions 2026

In the vocabulary of the relational model a table is a relation, and one complete horizontal entry of that table, such as all the details of a single student, is a tuple; the ordinary words for it are row and record.

Codd, a British computer scientist working at IBM, set out the relational model in a paper published in 1970, proposing that all data be held in simple two-dimensional tables and joined by matching values rather than by fixed pointers.

The hierarchical model is the first data model used in commercial database software; IBM built its Information Management System on it in the 1960s for the Apollo programme.

The Light We Carry is her second book, written after the memoir Becoming, and it sets out the habits and ideas she uses to face uncertainty.

Orbital, a short novel that follows six astronauts through a day of orbits around the earth, won the Booker Prize in 2024 for the British writer Samantha Harvey.

The American writer Walter Isaacson, who had earlier written the authorised life of Steve Jobs and books on Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, published his biography of Elon Musk in 2023 after following him for two years.

Spare is his own account of his life in and away from the British royal family, and the title refers to the old saying about an heir and a spare, the second son.

The South Korean writer Han Kang received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024 for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical trauma, and she is known for the novel The Vegetarian.

Shashi Tharoor, the writer and parliamentarian, wrote Ambedkar: A Life, a short life of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar; his other recent books include Pride, Prejudice and Punditry, and his earlier works are An Era of Darkness and Why I Am a Hindu.

Heart Lamp gathers short stories written in Kannada by Banu Mushtaq, and it won the International Booker Prize in 2025; it was the first collection of short stories to take that prize.

Her Hindi novel Ret Samadhi, translated into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, won the International Booker Prize in 2022 and became the first book originally written in any Indian language to do so; the prize money is shared equally by the author and the translator.

Raghuram Rajan, who was Governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 2013 to 2016, wrote Breaking the Mould with the economist Rohit Lamba, arguing that India should build on services and skills rather than copy the manufacturing path of East Asia.

Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India's External Affairs Minister and earlier the Foreign Secretary, wrote Why Bharat Matters, in which he explains India's place in a changing world order; his earlier book, published in 2020, is The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World.

The book tells the story of the Christian Medical College at Vellore, one of India's oldest teaching hospitals, and it was written by Dr. V I Mathan, a physician long associated with that institution.

Pankaj Mishra is an Indian essayist and novelist who writes on politics, history and ideas, and The World After Gaza is his book on how the conflict in West Asia is read differently in the West and in the formerly colonised world.

The Templeton Prize was instituted in 1972 by the investor John Templeton to honour work that explores the deepest questions of life and of the spirit, and Mother Teresa received the first award in 1973, six years before her Nobel Peace Prize.

It is named after Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who was the first High Commissioner for Refugees under the League of Nations and who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922.

It is named after Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear physicist who became a campaigner for civil liberties and himself won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.

Ramon Magsaysay was President of the Philippines and died in an air crash in 1957; the award was created in the same year in his memory, it is presented at Manila, and it honours greatness of spirit in service to the people of Asia.

The Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust instituted this prize in 1986, two years after Indira Gandhi's death, and it is presented on 19 November, her birth anniversary, with a cash award of twenty-five lakh rupees.