UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Udayin, also called Udayabhadra, was the son of Ajatashatru and the ruler of the Haryanka dynasty who built a fort at the meeting point of the Ganga and the Son and shifted the Magadhan capital there from Rajagriha.

Karewas are thick beds of fine clay, silt and sand laid down on the floor of a Pleistocene lake that once filled the Kashmir Valley; they form flat terraces above the Jhelum's floodplain, and the karewas around Pampore in Pulwama district produce the saffron for which the valley is famous…

The Damodar Valley Corporation was set up by an Act of Parliament in 1948, the first multipurpose river valley project of independent India, and it was consciously modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority of the United States, which had combined flood control, irrigation, navigation and power generation in one basin…

The Ziro Valley in the Lower Subansiri district of Arunachal Pradesh is the home of the Apatani, who grow rice and rear fish in the same flooded field without using draught animals, a system studied as a model of sustainable wet-land farming; the valley is on India's tentative list for…

Yumthang lies beyond the village of Lachung in north Sikkim, at roughly 3,500 metres, and the Shingba Rhododendron Sanctuary around it gives the valley the popular name of the Valley of Flowers of Sikkim; hot springs rise on the bank of the Lachung river and the Zero Point lies further…

A rift valley is a strip of land that has subsided between two roughly parallel faults, and both the Narmada, between the Vindhya and the Satpura, and the Tapi, between the Satpura and the Ajanta hills, occupy such troughs.

Duns, called duars in the eastern Himalaya, are flat-floored longitudinal valleys formed where coarse sediment carried down by Himalayan rivers was trapped between the Lesser Himalaya and the rising Shivalik range.

The Silent Valley National Park in the Palakkad district of Kerala, part of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, is drained by the Kunthipuzha, a tributary of the Bharathappuzha, and the park protects one of the last undisturbed blocks of tropical evergreen forest in the Western Ghats, with the lion-tailed macaque as…

The Valley of Flowers National Park lies in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand, in the Bhyundar valley drained by the Pushpawati, and it is inscribed on the World Heritage list together with the Nanda Devi National Park.

The Kullu Valley in Himachal Pradesh, along the Beas between Manali and Bhuntar, is called the Valley of the Gods because of the many village deities carried in procession at the Kullu Dussehra, which begins on the day the festival ends elsewhere in India.

The Nubra Valley lies north of Leh, reached across the Khardung La, where the Nubra river joins the Shyok, itself a tributary of the Indus; the sand dunes at Hunder carry the double-humped Bactrian camels left behind by the old Central Asian caravan trade, and the Diskit monastery stands above…

The Kashmir Valley is a broad structural basin about 135 kilometres long lying between the Pir Panjal in the south-west and the Great Himalaya, with its Zanskar branch, in the north-east; the Jhelum meanders across its flat floor and leaves it through a gorge at Baramulla into the Wular lake.

A line through the origin at 45° to each axis joins all the points where the distance along the horizontal axis equals the distance along the vertical axis.

Ram Manohar Lohia, the socialist thinker and leader, put forward the idea of Sapta Kranti, or seven revolutions, as the programme of Indian socialism.

The ozone layer lies in the stratosphere, mostly between about 15 and 35 km above the earth, and it absorbs most of the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation.

The Moderates, who led the Indian National Congress from 1885 to about 1905, did not seek to overthrow British rule; they believed in its basic fairness and wanted reforms within it.

Both statements about the Preamble are true. Statement 1 is correct because the Preamble resolves to secure to all citizens "EQUALITY of status and of opportunity", alongside justice (social, economic and political), liberty (of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship) and fraternity.

Avani Lekhara is an Indian para-shooter from Jaipur, Rajasthan, who competes in rifle events in the SH1 class. A car accident in 2012 left her with a spinal cord injury, and she took up shooting a few years later.

The Ganga flows from west to east across the northern plains, so the cities follow the order in which the river reaches them.

Statements 1 and 2 are correct, but statement 3 is not. Statement 1 is correct: the Bombay Presidency Association was founded in January 1885 by Pherozeshah Mehta, Badruddin Tyabji and K. T. Telang, and its members hosted the first session of the Indian National Congress in Bombay that December.