Teaching GK Questions 2026

Bolivia lost its coast on the Pacific to Chile in the War of the Pacific in the nineteenth century and now reaches the sea only through the ports of its neighbours, while Paraguay lies in the interior and depends on the Parana and Paraguay rivers for an outlet, which is…

The Great Artesian Basin lies below the dry interior of eastern Australia, mainly under Queensland and parts of New South Wales, South Australia and the Northern Territory, and it is the largest artesian basin in the world; water enters the porous rock where it is exposed near the Great Dividing…

The Panama Canal was opened in 1914 across the narrow isthmus of Panama, it is about eighty kilometres long and uses a system of locks and the artificial Gatun Lake, and it saves a ship sailing between New York and San Francisco the long voyage around Cape Horn at the…

The Pampas spread over the plains of Argentina and extend into Uruguay, and they are the home of wheat and alfalfa farming, of large cattle ranches called estancias and of the herdsmen known as gauchos; the grassland owes its growth to moderate rainfall and the cool season of the mid…

The Murray rises in the Snowy Mountains of the Great Dividing Range and, with its long tributary the Darling, drains the south-eastern interior of Australia; the basin is the country's chief farming region for wheat, fruit and sheep, and it is supported by the Snowy Mountains water scheme and by…

The Great Barrier Reef stretches for over two thousand kilometres in the Coral Sea along the north-eastern coast of Queensland, is the largest coral reef system in the world, and was placed on the list of World Heritage sites in 1981; the warm shallow tropical water of the continental shelf…

Death Valley lies in eastern California within the Mojave desert region and its floor at Badwater Basin is about eighty-six metres below sea level, the lowest land point of North America; it is also one of the hottest places recorded on the earth.

The Atacama lies in northern Chile between the Andes and the Pacific coast, and it is the driest desert in the world because the cold Peru or Humboldt current chills the air along the coast and the Andes block moisture from the Amazon side; the desert is also known for…

Lake Titicaca lies on the Altiplano plateau of the Andes at a height of about three thousand eight hundred metres and is shared by Peru and Bolivia; it is the highest lake in the world on which steamers ply, which is the exact reason it is called the highest navigable…

The Angel Falls drops about nine hundred seventy-nine metres from the Auyan Tepui table mountain in the Guiana Highlands of Venezuela and is the highest uninterrupted waterfall in the world; the local name is Kerepakupai Vena.

Aconcagua rises to about six thousand nine hundred sixty metres in the Andes in the province of Mendoza in Argentina, close to the border with Chile, and it is the highest peak of both South America and the southern hemisphere, as well as the highest mountain outside Asia.

Denali, which was earlier called Mount McKinley, stands in Alaska in the United States and is the highest peak of North America at about six thousand one hundred ninety metres; the name means the high one in the local Athabaskan language and was officially restored in 2015.

A small piece of tissue called an explant is placed in a sterile nutrient medium with growth regulators, it forms an unorganised mass called a callus and then whole plantlets, because a plant cell is totipotent, that is, able to give rise to a complete plant; the plants so raised…

The system comes from a defence mechanism of bacteria against viruses: a guide RNA takes the Cas9 protein to a chosen sequence in the DNA, Cas9 cuts both strands there, and the cell's own repair machinery then changes the sequence, so a gene can be switched off or corrected in…

This committee works under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and appraises proposals for the large scale use and the environmental release of genetically engineered organisms and products, so no transgenic crop may be grown commercially without its clearance.

The deficiency of adenosine deaminase destroys the immune system because the enzyme is needed for the normal working of lymphocytes, and in 1990 lymphocytes of a girl with this disorder were grown outside the body, given a functional gene and returned to her blood; since those cells are not permanent…

In 1983 the American company Eli Lilly put the DNA sequences of the A and B chains of human insulin into Escherichia coli, produced the two chains separately and joined them by disulphide bonds to make a hormone identical to the human one; it was sold as Humulin, the first…

The British geneticist Alec Jeffreys developed DNA fingerprinting in 1984 by studying short repeated sequences that vary in number from person to person, and the method is now used in criminal investigation, in disputes about parentage and in identifying victims of accidents and disasters.

Dolly was a sheep produced at the Roslin Institute in Scotland in 1996 by the technique of somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which the nucleus of an udder cell of one sheep was placed in an egg whose own nucleus had been removed, so the lamb carried the genes of…

The polymerase chain reaction repeats three steps, denaturation at a high temperature, annealing of short primers and extension of the new strand, so the enzyme must survive near boiling water; Taq polymerase, obtained from the bacterium Thermus aquaticus of hot springs, does exactly that and lets a single DNA segment…