UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The Unit Trust of India was established in 1963 by an Act of Parliament and launched its first scheme, Unit Scheme 1964 or US-64, in the following year; it held a monopoly of the business until 1987.

The NAV is the per unit book value of a scheme: take the market value of all the securities and cash the scheme holds, subtract its liabilities and accrued expenses, and divide by the number of units outstanding.

Mutual funds in India are registered with and regulated by the Securities and Exchange Board of India under the SEBI (Mutual Funds) Regulations, 1996, which lay down the three-tier structure of sponsor, trustees and asset management company, the scheme categories, the cap on the expense ratio and the disclosures a…

Anamudi, about 2,695 metres high, rises in the Anaimalai hills of the Idukki district of Kerala and is the highest peak of the Western Ghats and of the whole peninsular plateau south of the Himalayas; the Eravikulam National Park around it shelters the Nilgiri tahr.

Dhupgarh, about 1,350 metres high, stands in the Pachmarhi hills of Madhya Pradesh and is the highest peak of the Satpura range, which is a block mountain bounded by faults along the Narmada and the Tapi.

Residual or relict mountains are what is left when a plateau or an old mountain mass is worn down for a very long time and only the hardest rock stands out; the Nilgiri in the Western Ghats, Parasnath in Jharkhand, Girnar in Gujarat and the Rajmahal hills are the Indian…

A piedmont plateau lies at the foot of a mountain range with a plain or the sea on its other side, and it is usually lower than an intermontane plateau; Patagonia lies between the Andes and the Atlantic, and the Piedmont plateau of the United States between the Appalachians and…

A peneplain, meaning almost a plain, is the end stage of the normal cycle of river erosion in a humid region, when valleys have widened and divides have been worn down until the land lies close to base level, with a few resistant residual hills standing above it.

Khadar is the low-lying newer alluvium that the rivers flood and renew nearly every year, so it is free of lime nodules, rich in fine silt and the most productive land of the plain; in Punjab the Khadar strip along a river is called Bet.

The Bhabar is a narrow belt of eight to sixteen kilometres along the foot of the Shiwaliks, laid with pebbles and gravel brought down by the rivers; it is so permeable that the smaller streams sink into it and vanish.

The Deccan Trap was built by fissure eruptions of highly fluid basalt lava towards the close of the Cretaceous period, which spread as sheet after sheet over a vast area of western and central India; the weathering of that basalt gives the black cotton soil, also called regur.

Lying between the Himalayas on the south and the Kunlun on the north, it is an intermontane plateau, the highest and the largest in the world, with an average elevation of about four and a half thousand metres, which is why it is called the Roof of the World.

Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is a dormant volcano built up by repeated eruptions of lava and ash around its vents, and at 5,895 metres it is the highest point in Africa.

Block mountains are formed by tensional forces that break the crust along faults; the block left standing between or beside the faults is called a horst and the sunken trough is a graben or rift valley.

The Aravalli range of Rajasthan and Haryana is an old or relict fold mountain, folded in the Precambrian era and worn down by erosion to low, rounded hills; Guru Shikhar on Mount Abu is its highest point.

A water molecule has two hydrogen atoms of atomic mass one and one oxygen atom of atomic mass sixteen, so the masses are two and sixteen, which is a ratio of one to eight; this fixed ratio in every sample of water, whatever its source, is the classic illustration of…

Cholera is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae and spreads through water and food contaminated with faecal matter, which is why it breaks out after floods and wherever sewage mixes with the water supply; typhoid, hepatitis A, dysentery and polio spread the same way.

Soap is the sodium or potassium salt of a long chain fatty acid.

A moderator slows down the fast neutrons released by fission so that they can cause further fission, and heavy water is the best of them because it slows neutrons well while absorbing very few; in Indian pressurised heavy water reactors it also serves as the coolant that carries heat away…

In reverse osmosis the water is pushed through a semi-permeable membrane at a pressure greater than its osmotic pressure, so the flow runs opposite to natural osmosis; the membrane lets water molecules through and holds back dissolved salts, heavy metals and most microbes, which is why reverse osmosis is also…