State Exams GK Questions 2026

Ashvaghosha was a Buddhist monk and Sanskrit poet at the court of the Kushana ruler Kanishka I. He wrote the Buddhacharita, a life of the Buddha in Sanskrit verse, and the Saundarananda, and he acted as deputy to Vasumitra at the Fourth Buddhist Council held in Kashmir.

Nahapana belonged to the Kshaharata family of the Shakas, the Western Kshatrapas who ruled in western India, and not to the Kushanas at all.

The main Kushana capital was Purushapura, the modern Peshawar, which Kanishka I developed as his seat of power. As the empire spread into the Ganga-Yamuna plain, Mathura on the Yamuna became its second capital and the southern headquarters of the family.

Nominal GDP is measured at current prices and real GDP at the prices of a base year, so the ratio between them isolates the effect of the change in prices.

The real rate of interest is the nominal rate less the rate of inflation, an approximation known as the Fisher equation.

The wholesale price index is built entirely from the prices of goods traded in bulk, and it has exactly three major groups: primary articles, fuel and power, and manufactured products, of which manufactured products carry the largest weight.

The Monetary Policy Committee set up under the amended Reserve Bank of India Act has six members.

If the inflation rate falls from seven per cent to five per cent, prices are still higher than last year but they are rising more slowly.

A loan is repaid in a fixed number of rupees, and inflation reduces what those rupees can buy. The borrower therefore returns money of smaller real value than the money received, so the real burden of the debt falls.

The word joins stagnation and inflation, and it describes the awkward situation in which prices are rising fast while output is flat and unemployment is high.

It is described in the classic phrase as too much money chasing too few goods.

The wholesale price index is compiled and released every month by the Office of the Economic Adviser in the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

When the flexible inflation targeting framework was adopted after the amendment of the Reserve Bank of India Act in 2016, the combined rural and urban consumer price index released by the National Statistical Office was made the nominal anchor, as the Urjit Patel Committee had recommended.

El Nino is the periodic warming of the surface water of the central and eastern Pacific off the coast of Peru and Ecuador, and the name, meaning the child, was given by fishermen because it appears around Christmas.

These are low pressure systems, that is temperate cyclones, which form over the Mediterranean and the Caspian region and travel eastwards with the westerly jet stream.

These are the violent evening thunderstorms of the months before the monsoon in West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand and Assam, and the name means the calamity of the month of Baisakh because the squalls can flatten huts and trees.

Mawsynram lies in the Khasi hills, and the neighbouring Cherrapunji, now called Sohra, stands close behind it.

The south-west monsoon normally sets in over the Kerala coast about the first of June, and the sudden heavy downpour that marks its arrival is called the burst of the monsoon.

In the Koeppen classification as applied to India, the semi-arid steppe climate marked BShw covers parts of Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and the drier interior of the peninsula, where rainfall is low but not as low as in a true desert.

An isohyet is a line drawn on a map through all the places that receive the same amount of rainfall in a given period.