CTET GK Questions 2026

Ashvaghosha, a Sanskrit poet and Buddhist thinker, is placed at the court of the Kushana ruler Kanishka in the first and second centuries of the common era, and he also wrote the Saundarananda and is associated with the fourth Buddhist council held in Kashmir under Kanishka.

His play takes up the later life of Rama, after the events of the Ramayana.

Dinkar is the poet of Rashmirathi, a retelling of the Mahabharata from Karna's side, and of Kurukshetra and Parashuram ki Pratiksha, and he is often called a poet of rebellion.

The award was instituted by the Bharatiya Jnanpith in 1961 and is the senior literary honour given for a body of work in any of the languages recognised by the Constitution.

He deliberately chose the spoken language over Sanskrit so that the story of Rama could reach ordinary listeners, and the poem is still recited and staged across the Hindi belt.

Gopal Krishna Gokhale is said to have given her the title Bharat Kokila, the Nightingale of India. She was also the first woman to be president of the Indian National Congress, at the Kanpur session of 1925, and the first woman governor of an Indian state, in the United Provinces.

It became a marching song of the freedom movement and is played by the armed forces at ceremonial parades.

Kamayani takes the flood story of Manu from Indian tradition and turns it into a long allegory in which Manu stands for the mind, Shraddha for faith and Ida for reason.

The poem is arranged in songs meant to be sung and danced, and it is the text on which the Odissi repertoire and the Ashtapadi singing of temples rest.

The Meghaduta, or Cloud Messenger, is his short lyric poem in which a yaksha banished from his home asks a passing monsoon cloud to carry a message to his wife in Alaka, and the cloud's route becomes a description of the Indian landscape.

Rabindranath Tagore set it to music and sang it at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress in 1896, and after independence its first two stanzas were given the status of national song, declared to hold a place of honour equal to the national anthem.

The prize of 1913 made him the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in any field.

A gram of fat yields about nine kilocalories, more than twice the yield of carbohydrate or protein, because its carbon chains are far less oxidised to begin with; this is also why fat is the body’s store of energy and why fatty food is called energy dense.

Iodine is needed to make thyroxine, the hormone of the thyroid gland; when the supply is short the gland works harder and enlarges into the swelling at the front of the neck called goitre, and in an infant the same shortage stunts growth and mental development as cretinism.

Kwashiorkor appears when a child gets enough calories but far too little protein, typically after being weaned onto a starchy gruel; the signs are swelling of the feet and face, a distended belly, thin and discoloured hair and an apathetic look, while the muscles are not severely wasted.

These four dissolve in fat and not in water, so they travel with dietary fat, are stored in the liver and in body fat, show their deficiency only after a long shortage, and can be toxic in excess.

Retinol is vitamin A, and it is the raw material of rhodopsin, the pigment in the rod cells of the retina that lets us see in dim light; when it is short the eye cannot adjust to darkness, which is night blindness, and a longer shortage dries the conjunctiva as…

Vitamin D, chemically calciferol, is needed for the absorption of calcium and phosphorus from the intestine, so a child short of it cannot mineralise growing bone; the legs bow, the wrists thicken and the chest deforms, and the disease is rickets, while the same shortage in an adult softens formed…

Vitamin B12 is chemically cyanocobalamin, and the cobalt atom at the centre of its ring is what the name points to; it is the only vitamin that contains a metal, it is absorbed only with the help of intrinsic factor secreted by the stomach, and its shortage gives pernicious anaemia.

Vitamin B3 is niacin, also called nicotinic acid, and its shortage gives pellagra, remembered by the three Ds of dermatitis, diarrhoea and dementia, with death as a fourth if it is untreated; the disease appeared where maize was the staple, because the niacin in maize is bound and poorly absorbed.