UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

It is called a command economy because a central planning authority, and not the market, commands how resources are used: it fixes the targets of output, allots raw materials to factories and often fixes prices and wages as well.

A severe balance of payments crisis, with foreign exchange reserves down to a few weeks of imports, forced the government to announce the New Economic Policy in July 1991.

It inserted the words socialist, secular and integrity into the Preamble, so the description of India became a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic.

The Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956 followed the Congress session at Avadi that called for a socialistic pattern of society, and it gave the public sector the commanding role.

Because resources are scarce and wants are unlimited, every economy must answer three questions, and these are called its central problems: what goods and in what quantity to produce, how to produce them, that is by which technique and combination of labour and capital, and for whom to produce, that…

Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867; it analysed capital, surplus value and the exploitation of labour and became the basic text of what is called scientific socialism.

In such an economy the state owns and runs the industries that need very large capital or serve strategic and social purposes, regulates the rest by law, and leaves ordinary production to private enterprise, while keeping responsibility for welfare and employment.

The Scottish economist published the Wealth of Nations in 1776 and is called the father of economics; he argued that if each person pursues his own interest in a free market, an invisible hand guides the outcome to the good of society, which became the classic defence of capitalism and…

In a capitalist or market economy the means of production are privately owned and nobody issues orders about production.

The crust is the outermost and thinnest layer of the earth and is of two kinds. The continental crust, made largely of lighter granitic rock rich in silica and aluminium, averages about thirty kilometres in thickness and reaches about seventy kilometres under young fold mountains such as the Himalaya.

Plate tectonics, propounded in 1967, holds that the lithosphere is broken into seven major plates and a number of minor ones that move over the plastic asthenosphere.

Near Easter Island in the South Pacific the rise spreads at more than fifteen centimetres a year, the highest rate measured, while the Arctic Ridge in option A has the slowest rate of less than two and a half centimetres a year.

It lies between South America and the Pacific plate and is one of the well known minor plates, along with the Cocos, Arabian, Philippine, Caribbean, Juan de Fuca, Scotia, Caroline and Fuji plates.

Along the San Andreas Fault the Pacific plate and the North American plate slide horizontally past each other.

The Indian plate moved northwards and met the Eurasian plate. Both carry light continental crust, so neither could sink far into the mantle; instead the sediments of the Tethys Sea lying between them were compressed, folded and thrust upwards to form the Himalaya, and the collision is still going on…

After the detailed mapping of the ocean floor during and after the Second World War revealed mid-oceanic ridges, deep trenches and a surprisingly thin cover of sediment, Hess proposed in 1961 that molten material rises along the ridge, forms new ocean floor and pushes the older floor away on both…

When Pangaea began to break about two hundred million years ago, it parted into a northern mass called Laurasia or Angaraland and a southern mass called Gondwanaland, and the long narrow Tethys Sea lay between the two.

Wegener attributed the horizontal movement of the continents to the pole-fleeing force, which arises from the rotation of the earth and the bulge of the equator, and to the tidal force, which arises from the attraction of the moon and the sun.

Wegener held that about two hundred and fifty million years ago all the land of the earth lay together as one mass, Pangaea, and that one enormous ocean, Panthalassa, surrounded it.

Wegener, a German meteorologist and climatologist, put forward the continental drift theory in 1912 and developed it in his book The Origin of Continents and Oceans; he argued that all the continents once formed a single landmass, Pangaea, which broke up about two hundred million years ago.