UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Gupta gold coins, called dinara, survive in greater numbers than those of any other ancient Indian dynasty, and their types form a gallery of royal images: the King and Queen type, the Ashvamedha and Lyrist types of Samudragupta, and the Archer and Chakravikrama types of Chandragupta II.

Jahangir struck a celebrated series of gold and silver coins showing the twelve signs of the zodiac, and another series carrying his own portrait, which is unusual in Islamic coinage; he also issued coins in the name of Nur Jahan.

As part of his reform of the currency he issued a silver coin of about one hundred and seventy-eight grains called the rupiya, together with a copper dam and a gold mohur, and fixed their rates of exchange.

In 1329 or 1330 he issued brass and copper tokens declared to be worth a silver tanka.

Iltutmish gave the Delhi Sultanate its standard coinage by issuing the silver tanka and the copper jital, with purely Arabic legends and the name of the mint, and this pair remained the basis of Sultanate currency.

These are the oldest Indian coins, mostly silver pieces cut into irregular shapes and impressed with symbols punched one at a time, such as the sun, a six-armed wheel, hills, trees and animals.

Physiological density divides the total population of a region by the area of its cultivable or arable land, so it measures the pressure of all the people on the land that can actually grow food, and it is far higher than ordinary density in countries such as Egypt, where most…

Push factors are the unfavourable conditions of the place a person leaves, such as unemployment, poverty, crop failure, drought, flood, epidemic and political unrest; they push people out.

Natural growth is the increase that comes from the balance of births over deaths alone, so it is births minus deaths in the period, and it is negative when deaths exceed births.

Asia holds roughly three-fifths of all the people in the world, mainly in the two great clusters of East Asia and South Asia, which include the two most populous countries on earth.

The width of each bar in a population pyramid shows the share of that age group, so a broad base means that children form a very large part of the population, which happens where the birth rate is high; the narrow top shows that few people survive to old age.

In the first stage of the demographic transition the society is rural and agrarian, life expectancy is low, medical facilities are poor and literacy is low, so both the birth rate and the death rate are high and they roughly cancel each other, leaving population almost stationary.

Replacement level fertility is the total fertility rate at which a generation of women exactly replaces itself in the next generation.

The United Nations marked 15 November 2022 as the Day of Eight Billion, the date on which the world population was estimated to have reached eight thousand million.

In this essay of 1798 Malthus argued that population tends to increase in a geometric progression while the means of subsistence can increase only in an arithmetic progression, so growth must be restrained either by positive checks such as famine, disease and war, or by preventive checks such as late…

Density of population is a ratio between the number of people and the area they occupy, and the standard unit is the number of persons living in one square kilometre; it is the simplest way of measuring the pressure of people on land.

In ordinary matter most atoms sit in the lower energy level, so light passing through is absorbed more than it is amplified.

When a material becomes superconducting it pushes the magnetic field out of its interior and behaves as a perfect diamagnet, an effect reported by Meissner and Ochsenfeld in 1933; it is the reason a small magnet can be made to hover above a cooled superconductor, as in magnetic levitation demonstrations.

The Dutch physicist Kamerlingh Onnes, who had already succeeded in liquefying helium, cooled mercury with it in 1911 and found that its electrical resistance disappeared completely below about 4.2 kelvin, the first observation of superconductivity.

Coherence means that the waves in the beam keep a constant phase relationship, so crest marches with crest; this is a direct result of stimulated emission, since each new photon is emitted in phase with the photon that caused it, and it is what makes holography and interference work with…