UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Indian tradition credits Shalihotra with the science of horses, and veterinary medicine for horses came to be called Shalihotra Shastra after him.

The round drum below the lions of the Sarnath capital carries an elephant, a bull, a horse and a lion; there is no deer.

Both statements match the Jaina tradition: the place of Mahavira's enlightenment and the meaning of asrava. Mahavira left home at about thirty and spent some twelve years in hard penance.

Buying securities puts money into the economy and raising the cash reserve ratio takes it out, but raising the bank rate reduces money supply instead of increasing it.

The Fifteenth Finance Commission gave forest and ecology a weight of 10 per cent in deciding each State's share of the divisible pool of Union taxes.

On the expenditure side of India's GDP, private consumption is the largest share, investment (gross fixed capital formation) comes next, then government consumption, and net exports come last.

Methane and chlorine react in sunlight to give chloromethane and hydrogen chloride, not hydrogen gas. This is a substitution reaction: CH4 + Cl2 → CH3Cl + HCl in the presence of sunlight.

Acetic acid boils far above methane, and ethanol gives hydrogen with sodium, while statements 1 and 4 are false. Propyne (CH3–C≡CH) is an alkyne: it has one carbon–carbon triple bond and no double bonds, so statement 1 is wrong.

Gypsum heated at 373 K becomes calcium sulphate hemihydrate, CaSO4 · ½H2O, which is plaster of Paris, not CaSO4 · H2O as the statement says.

Myxomatosis passes from rabbit to rabbit through biting insects and contact, so it spreads fastest where rabbits are crowded together.

Making a genetically modified organism needs all three steps: find the useful DNA, put it into the host, and make sure the host keeps it and passes it on.

The ozone hole, a sharp seasonal thinning of stratospheric ozone, forms every southern spring over Antarctica. During the long polar winter a strong circular wind, the polar vortex, isolates the air over Antarctica, and temperatures fall low enough to form polar stratospheric clouds.

Eutrophication is the enrichment of a water body with nutrients, so statement 2 is correct, while statement 1 describes the opposite condition.

The major languages of India belong to four language families: Indo-European (Indo-Aryan), Dravidian, Austric (Austro-Asiatic) and Sino-Tibetan. The Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family is the largest, spoken by about three-quarters of Indians and including Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi and Odia.

An oxbow lake forms when a river erodes the outer banks of a meander and deposits silt that seals off the loop, so it needs both erosion and deposition.

Ibn Battuta came in the 14th century, Nikitin in the 15th, Monserrate in the 16th and Peter Mundy in the 17th.

Of the four states listed, Punjab had the smallest population in the 2011 Census, about 2.77 crore people. The 2011 Census, the fifteenth census of India, counted about 121 crore people in all.

John Kay, an English inventor, patented the flying shuttle in 1733, one of the first machines of the Industrial Revolution.

Shortughai, a Harappan trading settlement in north-eastern Afghanistan, is the site where traces of irrigation canals have been found. Most Harappan farmers relied on river floods and wells, and no canals have been found in the Indus heartland.

Section 110 of that Act lets a customs officer seize goods believed liable to confiscation, and it was used to take the 43.2 lakh foreign-origin cigarettes and the truck carrying them in Mizoram.