UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The associations of 1836 to 1885 were run by landlords, lawyers, teachers and journalists, drew their membership from the English-educated and propertied classes, and worked mainly in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras and Poona.

The session had originally been planned for Poona, but an outbreak of cholera there led to the change of venue to Bombay.

Surendranath Banerjee's Association called the first National Conference in Calcutta in December 1883, bringing delegates from several parts of India to discuss questions of national importance, and it held a second conference in December 1885.

The Madras Mahajana Sabha was founded that year by M. Viraraghavachariar, G. Subramania Iyer and P. Anandacharlu as a presidency-wide body for southern India, and it held a conference in Madras in December 1884 that brought together representatives of local associations.

They founded the Bombay Presidency Association in 1885, partly in reaction to the European hostility shown during the Ilbert Bill controversy, and the body became the main platform of western India in the year the Congress was born.

It appealed to a somewhat wider social group than the landlord bodies that preceded it, and within a year many of its members moved into the Indian Association.

In 1876 the maximum age for the Indian Civil Service examination was reduced, which made it even harder for Indian candidates, who had to travel to England to sit the examination, to qualify.

It aimed to create a strong body of public opinion, to unify Indians on common political questions, to promote Hindu and Muslim friendship and to draw the masses into public movements, and it kept the membership fee low so that poorer people could join.

The Sabha was set up in Poona in 1870 to act as a bridge between the government and the people, and its members held written authority from the villages around Poona to speak on their behalf, which gave it a representative character unusual for the time.

He had already formed the London Indian Society in 1865, and in 1866 he founded the East India Association in London, with branches later opened in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras.

The Landholders' Society of 1838 spoke for the zamindars of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, while the Bengal British India Society of 1843 was set up with the help of George Thompson to collect and publish information on the condition of the people.

It discussed questions of public interest and sent representations to the government, and because it came before every other body of its kind it is counted as the first political association in India.

The Kiel Canal is cut across the neck of the Jutland peninsula in northern Germany and allows ships to pass between the North Sea and the Baltic without sailing all the way round Denmark, saving several hundred kilometres and avoiding the rough waters off the Skagerrak.

The Trans-Andean Railway was built to join the Pacific coast of South America to the Atlantic coast, running from the Chilean port of Valparaiso across the Andes to Buenos Aires in Argentina.

A packet station handles short-distance traffic across a narrow stretch of water, carrying passengers, mail and vehicles rather than bulk cargo.

In the age of coal and later of oil, long ocean voyages had to be broken at fixed points where a ship could take on fuel, fresh water and provisions, and settlements at those points grew into ports.

Rotterdam stands on the delta where the Rhine and the Meuse reach the North Sea, which gives it inland waterway access to the industrial heart of Germany, Switzerland and France.

The Australian Trans-Continental Railway runs for about 4,000 km from Perth on the west coast to Sydney on the east, and on its way it crosses the Nullarbor Plain, a flat treeless limestone surface in the south of the continent.

The Northern Atlantic Sea Route links the north-eastern seaboard of North America with the industrial countries of western Europe, and because the two most developed manufacturing regions of the world face each other across this stretch of ocean it carries more traffic than any other sea route.

It crosses the isthmus of Central America, where the land rises well above sea level, so ships cannot simply be floated through.