UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The side event, titled ‘From Policy to Practice: Advancing India’s Biodiversity Commitments through Innovation, Finance, and ABS’, is scheduled for 28 October 2026 at the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, and it will set out how India turns its biodiversity promises into action through policy…

Its Target 13 calls for real measures to ensure that the gains from using genetic resources, digital sequence information and the traditional knowledge tied to them are shared fairly and equitably, which is exactly what India’s benefit-sharing payments to State Biodiversity Boards do.

Shares were not handed out equally: the National Biodiversity Authority used an area-based method, so a state’s portion grew with the geographical spread of the crops concerned and the land under them, read off the Unified Portal for Agricultural Statistics of the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare.

India’s access and benefit-sharing framework is governed by this Act, as amended in 2023, along with the Biological Diversity Rules, 2024, and the Access and Benefit-Sharing Regulations, 2025.

Explaining what real-time source apportionment means, Dr Jitendra Singh pointed to a screen showing that at that moment transport was contributing roughly 25 per cent of the air pollution in Delhi, while the overall pollution level stood at around 180.

AIRWISE, the Air Quality Warning and Integrated Decision Support System for Emissions, issues air-quality forecasts at a spatial resolution of 400 metres for the following 72 hours.

The laboratory has been established under Mission Mausam, announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to deepen the scientific understanding of atmospheric pollution and to supply usable evidence for managing air quality in Delhi NCR.

That is the full form of AATAL, the facility inaugurated for Delhi NCR by Dr Jitendra Singh at the Delhi branch of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.

The Ahmedabad mill strike of 1918 was Gandhi's satyagraha for industrial workers. A dispute arose between the cotton mill owners and the workers over the plague bonus, which the owners wanted to withdraw.

Balakot, along with Nageshwar in Gujarat, is described as a specialised centre for making shell objects. Both settlements lay near the coast, where shells were easy to collect, and excavations there have found large amounts of shell waste, unfinished pieces and finished items.

Dryland farming is practised where annual rainfall is below about 75 cm. Indian agriculture is grouped by the source of moisture into irrigated and rainfed farming, and rainfed farming is further divided into dryland and wetland farming.

Relative humidity compares the moisture in the air with what the air could hold, and that capacity rises with temperature.

Thawing is the melting of ice, a physical change that works on rocks only mechanically.

Tuff is the rock formed when volcanic ash settles in layers and hardens.

Temperature inversion needs rapid cooling of the ground, which happens under clear skies, not cloudy ones. Statement I is correct: normally temperature falls with height, but during an inversion a layer of warmer air lies above cooler air near the ground, so the normal lapse rate is reversed.

The land-use classification kept in India's land revenue records divides the reporting area into nine categories.

The Suez Canal is an artificial sea-level waterway joining two seas, and it is the busier and more important of the two great canals.

Both statements describe standard facts about how air temperature is measured and how it changes with height.

Lithification is the name for turning loose sediment into solid rock. Fragments produced by weathering and erosion are carried by rivers, wind, glaciers or waves and laid down in layers.

Pressure of water breaks rock mechanically without changing its minerals, so it is a physical process. Weathering is the breaking down of rocks where they lie.