UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Its sieve tubes, helped by companion cells, carry sucrose and other soluble food from a source such as a mature leaf to a sink such as a root, fruit or bud, and the movement can be upward or downward.

It occurs through pores called hydathodes at the leaf margin or tip, usually in the early morning when the soil is moist, the air is humid and transpiration is low, so root pressure forces out drops of water with dissolved salts; Colocasia, grasses and tomato show it well.

Dixon and Joly explained that water molecules cling to one another by cohesion and to the xylem walls by adhesion, forming an unbroken column; evaporation from the leaf surface creates a suction at the top that pulls this column upward.

A price floor is a lowest price fixed by the government, and the MSP guarantees farmers that price for crops such as jowar.

In the Hadley cell, air rises near the equator and sinks at about 30 degrees latitude, in the subtropical high-pressure belts.

Belarus is a landlocked country in eastern Europe, far south of the Arctic, so it has no tundra. Tundra vegetation grows beyond the tree line, mainly north of the Arctic Circle, where summers are short and cool and the subsoil stays frozen as permafrost.

India's standard meridian is 82°30' East, and Indian Standard Time is set by the local time along this line. India stretches from about 68°7' E to 97°25' E, a spread of nearly 30 degrees of longitude, which makes a time difference of about two hours between Gujarat and Arunachal Pradesh.

The Extended Fund Facility is a lending arrangement of the International Monetary Fund for countries with serious balance of payments problems.

PMSSY was set up to correct regional imbalances in tertiary health care and to improve medical education; universal immunisation is not its aim.

Egg white is mostly water and protein, and heat denatures these proteins so that they set into an opaque white solid.

Both statements are true, and UPSC's official key also gives C. Water vapour is a variable gas, from almost nil in cold deserts to about 4 percent of the air by volume in the warm, humid tropics.

Both statements are correct: a ground inversion is formed by radiation cooling, and it is the same as a negative lapse rate near the surface.

SGML was designed to be independent of both hardware and software, so saying it depends on a computer's hardware is false.

By mass, an adult human body has the most oxygen, then carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen. Oxygen makes up about 65 percent of body mass, carbon about 18 percent, hydrogen about 10 percent and nitrogen about 3 percent.

The Great Himalayan area in Himachal Pradesh is a national park, not a biosphere reserve. The Great Himalayan National Park lies in Kullu district of Himachal Pradesh.

Near the horizon, sunlight crosses a much thicker layer of air, and scattering removes most of the blue light before it reaches us.

The glass of a glowing bulb is heated mainly by radiation from the white-hot filament, not by convection. Conduction passes heat through a solid from particle to particle, convection carries heat by the actual movement of a fluid, and radiation sends heat as electromagnetic waves that need no medium.

The sub-prime crisis was the collapse of risky American home loans in 2007 and 2008 that set off the worldwide Great Recession.

A normal demand curve slopes downward from left to right, so its slope is negative. The law of demand says that, other things remaining the same, the quantity demanded of a good rises when its price falls and falls when its price rises.

Both the North Atlantic Drift and the Brazil Current carry warm water from low latitudes towards higher latitudes. As a rule, currents that flow from the equator towards the poles are warm, and those that flow from the poles towards the equator are cold.