UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Article 21 says that no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law, an expression the Constituent Assembly borrowed from the Japanese Constitution.

Bali Jatra, meaning the voyage to Bali, is held at Cuttack on the bank of the Mahanadi on Kartik Purnima, when people float small paper and banana bark boats in memory of the merchants of Kalinga who sailed to Bali, Java, Sumatra and Borneo; the same day is marked as…

Korkai lay near the mouth of the Tamraparni in the present Thoothukudi district, and it was the headquarters of the Pandya pearl fishery of the Gulf of Mannar, praised by the Periplus and by the Sangam poets; the sea has since receded and left the site inland.

The correct answer is B, Rajendra I, the son of Rajaraja I, who in 1025 of the Christian era sent a Chola fleet across the Bay of Bengal against Srivijaya, the trading power that controlled the straits of Malacca and Sunda, and recorded the campaign in his inscriptions along with…

The Sangam poems and later Sanskrit texts call pepper yavanapriya, literally dear to the Yavanas, the word used for the Greeks and Romans who crowded the Malabar ports for it.

Around the middle of the first century of the Christian era this pilot is said to have worked out the rhythm of the south west monsoon, after which ships ran straight from the mouth of the Red Sea to the Malabar coast instead of hugging the shore, cutting the voyage…

Tamralipti is modern Tamluk in Purba Medinipur district, on the Rupnarayan river near its meeting with the Hooghly.

Arikamedu, on the Ariyankuppam river near Puducherry, is identified with the Poduke of the Periplus and the Poduke emporion of Ptolemy.

Muziris, called Muchiri in Tamil sources, stood near Kodungallur on the Periyar, and the excavations at Pattanam in Ernakulam district have yielded Roman amphora sherds, glass beads and brick structures that fit its description in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.

It drained the trade of the Satavahana and Kshatrapa lands through the Narmada and Tapti valleys and sent out cotton cloth, long pepper, spikenard and gems.

Lothal lies in the Bhal region of Gujarat, near the head of the Gulf of Khambhat, and was excavated by S. R. Rao.

The divide between the two great northern systems does not run along a mountain here but across the almost flat plain of Haryana, and Ambala sits on it, so water falling a little to its west goes to the Ghaggar and the Indus side while water falling to its east…

It is the second of the two large west flowing peninsular rivers and runs almost parallel to the Narmada, with the Satpura range between them.

The correct answer is A, the Amarkantak plateau in Madhya Pradesh, where the Narmada rises at about one thousand metres and begins its westward journey of some thirteen hundred kilometres through Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat to the Gulf of Khambhat; on the way it makes the Dhuandhar falls and the…

It flows west through the narrow rift between the Vindhya and the Satpura ranges and opens into the Gulf of Khambhat, where strong tides sweep away the silt, so the river ends in a funnel shaped estuary and not a delta; the Tapi, which also flows west in a rift…

These rivers were flowing when the Himalaya was still rising, and instead of being turned aside they cut downward as fast as the land rose, leaving the gorges of the Indus near Gilgit, of the Satluj at Shipki and of the Brahmaputra at the great bend in the Dihang.

Loktak lies in the floor of the Manipur valley, which is ringed by hills, so the streams of the valley run inward into it from every side, the classic shape of a centripetal pattern; the lake is also known for its floating phumdis and for Keibul Lamjao, the only floating…

It rises at Trimbakeshwar in Nashik district of Maharashtra, runs about one thousand four hundred kilometres across Maharashtra, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh to the Bay of Bengal, and drains about 3.1 lakh square kilometres, the largest catchment in the peninsula, which is why it is called the Ganga of the…

The correct answer is C, the Ganga basin, which covers about 8.6 lakh square kilometres inside India, close to a quarter of the country, and takes in parts of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Delhi.

In a radial pattern the streams start from a dome, a volcanic cone or a high plateau and run outward in all directions like the spokes of a wheel.