UPSC CAPF GK Questions 2026

In this judgment of 2013 the Supreme Court held that the right to reject every candidate is part of the freedom of expression and of the secrecy of the ballot, and it directed the Election Commission to provide a None of the Above button; the Commission used it from the…

The Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order, 1968 was issued by the Election Commission under Article 324 and the Conduct of Elections Rules, and it governs the recognition of national and state parties, the reservation of symbols for them, the list of free symbols for other candidates, and disputes between…

Section 29A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 is the provision under which an association or body of individual citizens applies to the Election Commission for registration as a political party, and the application must carry a specific undertaking of true faith and allegiance to the Constitution, to…

The Tenth Schedule was added by the Fifty-second Amendment in 1985 and it disqualifies a member of Parliament or of a state legislature who voluntarily gives up the membership of the party on whose ticket the seat was won, or who votes or abstains against the party direction; the Speaker…

The Constitution (Sixty-first Amendment) Act, 1988 amended Article 326 and lowered the qualifying age for a voter from twenty-one to eighteen years, and it took effect in March 1989, so the general election of 1989 was the first in which eighteen-year-olds voted.

The elephant is the reserved symbol of the Bahujan Samaj Party, founded by Kanshi Ram in 1984; because the elephant is also used by another party in Assam and Sikkim, the Election Commission allots it to the Bahujan Samaj Party elsewhere, a detail that shows how reserved symbols work under…

Article 324 places the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of electoral rolls and the conduct of all elections to Parliament, to the state legislatures and to the offices of President and Vice-President in the Election Commission of India, and this is the Article the Commission relies on when…

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…

Golden Rice carries genes that let the grain make beta carotene, the orange pigment that the human body converts into vitamin A, and the colour of the grain gives the variety its name; the aim is to reduce night blindness and childhood blindness in populations whose diet is mainly rice.

The genes called cry genes are taken from Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterium of the soil that forms protein crystals during its spore stage.

This soil bacterium naturally transfers a part of its tumour inducing plasmid, called the Ti plasmid, into the cells of a dicotyledonous plant and causes crown gall disease; genetic engineers disarm the plasmid, insert the gene they want and use the bacterium as a vector, which is why it is…

A restriction endonuclease recognises a short palindromic sequence in DNA and cuts both strands there, leaving sticky ends that can pair with another piece cut by the same enzyme; Hind II was the first such enzyme to be discovered and EcoRI from Escherichia coli is the most widely used.

The correct answer is B, Maharashtra, which set up its Lokayukta in 1971 and so was the first State where the institution actually began to work.