UPSC CAPF GK Questions 2026

Zygogramma bicolorata is a leaf-feeding beetle from Mexico, the native region of Parthenium hysterophorus, and it was introduced in India as a biological control agent because its grubs and adults strip the weed of leaves and check its seed production.

Parthenium hysterophorus reached India from tropical America, reportedly with imported wheat, and spread rapidly over waste ground, roadsides and fallow fields.

The Wildlife Crime Control Bureau is a multi-disciplinary statutory body created in 2007 under section 38Z of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972.

CITES sorts species into appendices according to how badly trade threatens them.

The text of CITES was agreed by the representatives of eighty countries meeting at Washington in the United States in 1973, which is why the treaty is also called the Washington Convention; it then entered into force on 1 July 1975, and India became a party in 1976.

It is a free-floating plant of South American origin that was brought to India for its attractive flowers.

The correct answer is A, the Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park at Darjeeling, the highest altitude zoo in India, which runs recognised conservation breeding programmes for the red panda, the snow leopard and the Himalayan wolf, and has released captive-bred red pandas into the Singalila landscape.

The correct answer is B, Kuno National Park in the Sheopur area of Madhya Pradesh, where cheetahs brought from Namibia and South Africa were released from 2022 under the cheetah reintroduction project; the cheetah had been declared extinct in India in 1952.

The breeding centres stand in the Jaisalmer region, near the Desert National Park, which holds the largest surviving population of the bird, and they are run by the state forest department with the Wildlife Institute of India: eggs are collected from the wild, hatched in incubators and the chicks reared…

The correct answer is C, about minus 196 degrees Celsius, the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, at which all metabolic activity in the stored material stops and the germplasm can be kept for very long periods without change.

These seeds lose their viability when their moisture content is reduced, so they cannot be kept in the cold rooms of a seed bank; mango, jackfruit, coconut, cocoa and most tropical fruit trees are examples, and they are conserved instead in field gene banks, as tissue cultures or in cryobanks.

The Botanical Survey of India was founded in 1890 with its headquarters in Kolkata, close to the Indian Botanic Garden at Howrah, and it surveys the plant resources of the country, publishes floras and maintains herbaria and botanical gardens through its regional circles.

The correct answer is A, the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources at New Delhi, an institute of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, which holds the National Gene Bank where seeds of crop plants and their wild relatives are stored at low temperature for long-term conservation.

The correct answer is B, Robert Kyd, an officer of the East India Company who proposed and founded the garden at Shibpur in Howrah in 1787, first for growing plants of economic value such as teak and spices.

The correct answer is B, the Alipore Zoological Garden in Kolkata, opened to the public in 1876 and therefore the oldest formally established zoo in the country.

The amendment of 1991 inserted the provisions on zoos into that Act, and the Central Zoo Authority was constituted in 1992 to recognise zoos, prescribe standards for animal housing, upkeep and veterinary care and coordinate conservation breeding; a zoo without its recognition cannot operate.

Ex-situ conservation means keeping a species, or only its germplasm, outside its natural habitat, which is what a botanical garden, a zoo, an aquarium, a seed bank, a gene bank or a conservation breeding centre does.

Pinctada margaritifera is the black lip pearl oyster, a bivalve mollusc of the warm shallow water of the Indo-Pacific, where it fastens itself to coral reefs by strong threads.

Hubbardia heptaneuron, known as Hubbard's grass or the Jog Falls grass, is a species of grass that grew only in the spray zone of the Jog Falls on the Sharavathi river in Karnataka.

The correct answer is the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, under which the Dr. Ambedkar International Centre in New Delhi functions, and which announced the holding of the second Madhava Menon Memorial Lecture there.