State Exams GK Questions 2026

Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya, sits on rolling grassy uplands with pine woods, waterfalls and a cool damp climate, and British officers thought the landscape resembled the Scottish highlands, so the name Scotland of the East stuck.

The red panda, a small russet mammal of temperate bamboo forest in the eastern Himalaya, is the state animal of Sikkim, and the Singalila and Neora Valley belt is its Indian habitat.

The khejri, Prosopis cineraria, is the state tree of Rajasthan and the lifeline of the desert: it fixes nitrogen, its pods called sangri are eaten, its leaves feed livestock and it gives shade without drawing much water.

Kochi in Kerala has been the leading natural harbour of the Malabar coast since the fifteenth century, when a flood opened the Kochi inlet, and Portuguese, Dutch and English traders each made it their base.

Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, on the Noyyal river near the Palakkad gap, grew into a centre of cotton spinning and textile machinery, and the concentration of mills earned it the name Manchester of South India.

Jodhpur in Rajasthan is called the Blue City because the old town below the Mehrangarh fort is painted in indigo washed blue, a habit that began with the houses of Brahmin families and spread through the lanes.

The Nilgiri tahr, a stocky wild goat of the high grasslands and cliffs of the Western Ghats, is the state animal of Tamil Nadu.

The Great Indian Bustard, known in Rajasthan as the godawan, is one of the heaviest flying birds in the world and one of the most threatened.

The sangai or Manipur brow-antlered deer is found only on the floating phumdi vegetation of Keibul Lamjao National Park in the southern part of Loktak Lake, the only floating national park in the world.

The hangul or Kashmir stag is the only Asiatic subspecies of the red deer found in India, and it survives mainly in the Dachigam National Park near Srinagar.

The chinkara, also called the Indian gazelle, is the state animal of Rajasthan. It is a small antelope of dry scrub and desert that can survive long spells without drinking, which suits the Thar, and the Bishnoi community of western Rajasthan has protected it for centuries.

When the government set longer term goals for the space programme in 2023, it named an Indian space station, the Bharatiya Antariksh Station, and an Indian crewed landing on the Moon.

Born at Karnal in Haryana, Kalpana Chawla studied aeronautical engineering, moved to the United States and joined NASA, flying first on the shuttle Columbia in 1997 as a mission specialist.

All Indian orbital launches, including the PSLV, GSLV and LVM3 flights, lift off from Sriharikota on the Andhra Pradesh coast, which has two operational launch pads.

China launched Yang Liwei aboard Shenzhou-5 in October 2003, becoming the third country after the Soviet Union and the United States to send a human into orbit on its own rocket and spacecraft.

The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth once aboard Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961, becoming the first human being in space.

Vyommitra, a name built from vyom for sky and mitra for friend, is a half-humanoid robot developed by ISRO to fly on an uncrewed Gaganyaan mission.

The Human Space Flight Centre, set up in 2019 as the ISRO centre responsible for the Gaganyaan programme, works from Bengaluru, which is also the location of the ISRO headquarters, the U R Rao Satellite Centre and the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network.

The crew module is the pressurised double walled cabin where the astronauts live, and it is the only part that returns to Earth, protected by a heat shield and lowered by parachutes.

TV-D1, the first test vehicle abort mission, was launched from Sriharikota on 21 October 2023.