UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The United Provinces were renamed Uttar Pradesh on 24 January 1950, two days before the Constitution came into force, and the state keeps that date as Uttar Pradesh Day.

Sarojini Naidu, the poet and Congress leader called the Nightingale of India, was appointed Governor of the United Provinces, soon renamed Uttar Pradesh, in 1947, which made her the first woman to hold a Governor's office in India.

Faizabad, both district and division, was renamed Ayodhya in 2018 after the ancient city within it; in the same year Allahabad became Prayagraj and the Mughalsarai railway junction in Chandauli was renamed after Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya.

It had the largest population of any district of the state at the 2011 census, counting both the city and its very large rural area.

Lakhimpur Kheri, on the Nepal border in the Terai, is the largest district of the state in area and holds the Dudhwa National Park, famous for the tiger and the swamp deer, the state animal.

The Chitrakoot Dham division is one of the two divisions of the state that are not named after their headquarters, and its office sits at Banda, with Chitrakoot, Mahoba and Hamirpur as the other districts of the division.

Sonbhadra, in the extreme south-east of the state, touches Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar, which makes it the only district in India bordering four states; it is the second largest district of Uttar Pradesh in area and, because of its thermal and hydel stations, is called the energy capital…

The seventy-five districts of Uttar Pradesh are grouped into eighteen divisions, each under a Commissioner: Agra, Aligarh, Ayodhya, Azamgarh, Bareilly, Basti, Chitrakoot Dham, Devipatan, Gorakhpur, Jhansi, Kanpur, Lucknow, Meerut, Mirzapur, Moradabad, Prayagraj, Saharanpur and Varanasi.

The state had seventy districts after thirteen hill districts were separated in November 2000 to form Uttarakhand, and five more were created between 2008 and 2011, namely Kasganj, Amethi, Hapur, Sambhal and Shamli, taking the number to seventy-five.

Bhilwara grew into the largest centre of synthetic yarn, suiting and shirting in Rajasthan and is commonly called the textile city or the Manchester of Rajasthan; the same district also holds the Rampura Agucha zinc mine.

The campaign took up village level works such as check dams, anicuts, farm ponds, contour trenches and the repair of old tanks, with the aim of making each village self-reliant in water, and it was carried out in phases in selected panchayats of every district.

Jhamarkotra is the largest rock phosphate deposit worked in India and supplies the raw material for phosphatic fertiliser, which is why the country's dependence on imported phosphate is reduced by it; the mine is run by Rajasthan State Mines and Minerals Limited.

Rawatbhata stands on the Chambal, near the Rana Pratap Sagar dam, within Chittorgarh district, though the station is often described as being near Kota because that is the larger city close by, and that is exactly the trap in this question.

The Mangala field, found in 2004 in the Barmer basin, with Bhagyam and Aishwariya nearby, made Rajasthan an oil producing state, and the crude is carried by a heated pipeline to the Gujarat coast; a refinery is being built at Pachpadra in the same district.

Makrana supplies the fine white marble used in the Taj Mahal and in the Victoria Memorial, and its quarries were recognised as a global heritage stone resource; marble is also cut at Kishangarh in Ajmer district, the largest marble market of the country.

The Khetri belt, with the nearby Kolihan mine, is the chief source of copper in Rajasthan and one of the main copper areas of India, worked by Hindustan Copper Limited; the ore is smelted and refined in the same region.

Rampura Agucha is the state's best known lead and zinc deposit and one of the largest zinc producing mines in the world; Rajasthan is the only state in India that supplies lead and zinc concentrates, the other mines being Zawar near Udaipur, the oldest of them, and Rajpura Dariba.

Mustard is the leading rabi oilseed of the state, grown with light irrigation in Bharatpur, Alwar, Sawai Madhopur, Sri Ganganagar and Hanumangarh, and Rajasthan has long been the largest producer in the country; the oilseed trade of Bharatpur and the many oil mills of the eastern districts rest on it.

Pearl millet needs little water and stands high temperature, which suits the sandy soils of western Rajasthan, and the state leads the country in its production; it is grown as a kharif crop in Barmer, Jaisalmer, Bikaner, Nagaur and Jodhpur and eaten as the staple bread of the region.

In October 1962 American aerial photographs revealed Soviet missile sites under construction in Cuba; President John F. Kennedy ordered a naval quarantine of the island and, after thirteen days, Nikita Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles, the United States undertaking not to invade Cuba.