State Exams GK Questions 2026

One byte holds eight bits, and each bit can be either 0 or 1, so the number of different patterns is 2 raised to the power 8, that is 256.

Hexadecimal has base 16 and therefore needs sixteen different symbols. The digits 0 to 9 serve for the first ten values, and because no single digit exists for the values 10 to 15, the letters A to F are borrowed.

The 2's complement is found in two steps. First take the 1's complement by changing every 0 to 1 and every 1 to 0; for 1010 this gives 0101.

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. In its standard form it is a seven-bit code, so it can represent 2 raised to the power 7, that is 128 different characters: the English capital and small letters, the ten digit symbols, punctuation marks and a set of control…

To convert a binary number to decimal, write the place values from the right as 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and so on, multiply each bit by its place value and add the results.

The octal system has base 8, so it uses only the eight digits from 0 to 7. The general rule is that the largest digit of any number system is one less than its base, which means the digits 8 and 9 can never appear in an octal number.

Storage units in computing grow in powers of two rather than powers of ten, because addresses are binary. One kilobyte is 2 raised to the power 10 bytes, which equals 1024 bytes.

A bit, short for binary digit, is a single 0 or 1 and is the smallest unit of data a computer handles.

The safest way to handle a binary subtraction in an examination is to convert both numbers to decimal, subtract, and convert the answer back.

To turn a binary number into octal, group the bits in threes starting from the rightmost bit, adding leading zeros to complete the last group, because three bits cover the eight octal digits.

Octal has base 8, and because 2 raised to the power 3 equals 8, every octal digit expands into exactly three binary bits.

Hexadecimal has base 16, and because 2 raised to the power 4 equals 16, exactly four binary bits make one hexadecimal digit.

Salim Ali, known as the Birdman of India, was the ornithologist whose surveys built the modern study of Indian birds, and The Book of Indian Birds is his best-known work, long used as a field guide.

Sunny Days was written by the opening batsman Sunil Gavaskar, whose nickname was Sunny, and it covers his early career including the record-breaking debut series in the West Indies.

Mind Master was written by the chess Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand with the writer Susan Ninan, and it sets out the lessons in concentration, preparation and handling defeat that Anand drew from his world championship matches.

The Aryabhatiya is a short Sanskrit work in verse, written by the astronomer and mathematician Aryabhata, which states an accurate approximation for pi, explains the daily rotation of the earth as the cause of the apparent motion of the stars, and gives the correct reason for eclipses.

Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, setting out the theory that species change over generations through natural selection, in which individuals better suited to their surroundings leave more offspring.

Straight from the Heart is the autobiography of the all-rounder Kapil Dev, who captained India to its first cricket World Cup title in 1983 at Lord's and who was the first bowler to take four hundred Test wickets.

The shooter Abhinav Bindra, who won the ten metre air rifle gold at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and became independent India's first individual Olympic gold medallist, wrote this book with the sports journalist Rohit Brijnath.

Unbreakable is the autobiography of the boxer M C Mary Kom of Manipur, a multiple world champion and an Olympic bronze medallist at London in 2012, and the book describes her journey from a farming family in Manipur to the world stage while raising a family.