UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Their wavelength runs from about a tenth of a metre up to many kilometres, which makes them the longest and therefore the lowest in frequency and energy of the whole spectrum; they are used in broadcasting, mobile telephony and radio astronomy.

In an electromagnetic wave the electric field, the magnetic field and the direction of propagation are mutually perpendicular, and because the wave is made of fields and not of vibrating particles it needs no medium, which is how sunlight crosses empty space while sound cannot.

In 1887 he used a spark gap oscillator to generate waves and a loop with a gap to detect them, and he measured their wavelength and showed that they behaved like light in reflection and refraction, which confirmed the theory.

Tides are the regular rise and fall of sea level caused mainly by the gravitational pull of the Moon, and to a lesser extent the Sun, on the Earth.

The Precambrian covers all of Earth's history from its formation about 4.6 billion years ago to the start of the Cambrian about 541 million years ago.

The Caspian has no natural outlet to any ocean, so it is a landlocked water body, in fact the largest inland body of water on Earth.

Parallels shrink as they move towards the poles, so the 0° parallel, the Equator, is the longest of all. Parallels of latitude are circles drawn parallel to the Equator.

Weather maps and reports in India give atmospheric pressure in millibars, the same value as hectopascals. Air pressure is the weight of the air column pressing on a unit area.

The Harmattan blows over West Africa towards the Gulf of Guinea, far from the Mediterranean. The Harmattan is a dry, dusty north-easterly trade wind that blows from the Sahara across West Africa between November and March.

Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, usually about 88 parts copper to 12 parts tin. Adding tin makes copper harder, stronger and easier to cast, and bronze also resists corrosion well.

The Kiratarjuniya, a Sanskrit epic poem of the sixth century, was written by Bharavi. The Kiratarjuniya tells, in 18 cantos, a story from the Vana Parva of the Mahabharata: Arjuna performs penance to win divine weapons, and Shiva tests him by appearing as a Kirata, a mountain hunter.

A famine is marked by widespread deaths from starvation and from epidemics, which spread through contaminated water, rotting food and bodies weakened by hunger.

Population ageing is the process by which the share of older people becomes proportionately larger, not lesser, so statement 1 is false, while statement 2 is true.

A hygrometer measures humidity, that is, the amount of water vapour or moisture in the air. The name comes from the Greek "hygros", meaning wet.

Moving from north to south across Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, these ranges appear in exactly this order. The Karakoram, the northernmost, holds K2 (Godwin Austen), India's highest peak, and large glaciers such as the Siachen.

Karaikkal Ammaiyar was a Nayanar, one of the Tamil saints devoted to Shiva, so this statement is not correct. The early Bhakti movement of Tamil Nadu, from about the sixth century, was led by two groups of poet-saints: the Alvars, devotees of Vishnu, and the Nayanars, devotees of Shiva.

NW-1 is on the Ganga, NW-10 on the Amba river in Maharashtra and NW-100 on the Tapi, so all three pairs are correctly matched.

Organic farming relies heavily on crop rotation, not on as little of it as possible, so this is the statement that is not correct.

Article 371 and its sub-articles make special provisions for several States, but Madhya Pradesh is not one of them.

Under Article 243G, it is the Legislature of a State, not Parliament, that may by law give Panchayats powers to prepare plans and to carry out schemes for economic development and social justice.