UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Conventional sources are those in long use before modern technology offered alternatives, that is coal, petroleum, natural gas, firewood, cattle dung cake and water power.

Coal, petroleum and natural gas were formed over millions of years from buried plant and animal remains, so once a seam or a field is worked out it is not replaced in any human timescale.

Hisardale was bred at Hisar in Haryana to get finer wool from animals that could still live in the hot dry plains, so the hardy local Nali ewes of the Bikaner side were crossed with Merino rams, the standard fine wool breed of the world.

Vita is the brand under which it sells milk, ghee, butter, paneer, curd and sweets, and the milk behind the brand is gathered on the three tier Anand pattern: village societies collect it, district unions pool it and the federation processes and markets it through plants at Jind, Rohtak, Ambala…

The National Dairy Research Institute at Karnal is the premier dairy research body of the country, working on milk production, processing and animal reproduction, and the first cloned buffalo calf of India was produced in its laboratories.

The buffalo research institute was set up at Hisar because the town sits in the Murrah tract and already had the agricultural university and a very large government livestock farm, so breeding stock and expertise were at hand.

The breed takes its name from the region and is the classic dual purpose cattle of the state: white or light grey, with a long narrow face, a small hump and strong legs, giving a useful quantity of milk and bullocks once prized for ploughing and carting.

The Murrah is the buffalo of Rohtak, Jind, Hisar and Bhiwani, jet black and heavy bodied with short, tightly curled horns, and it yields more milk and richer milk than any other buffalo breed of India.

The correct answer, as marked in the paper, is D, Kankrej. The Kankrej of the Kutch and Banaskantha country is rated the best of the Indian dual purpose cattle breeds: it is the largest and heaviest of them, its bullocks have the fastest and most enduring gait of any Indian…

The Merino, of Spanish origin and now reared in large numbers in Australia, is the standard fine wool sheep of the world, its fleece being soft, dense and of very small fibre diameter.

The corrected lactometer reading, written CLR, is the figure read on the neck of a lactometer floating in milk, and the specific gravity is obtained from it by the simple relation one plus the reading divided by one thousand.

In the Gerber test a measured quantity of milk is mixed with sulphuric acid and amyl alcohol in a butyrometer and spun in a centrifuge; the acid digests everything but the fat, which rises into the graduated neck of the tube and is read off directly as a percentage.

The wet alluvium and the long warm monsoon of the north eastern districts, above all Katihar, Purnia and Araria, suit jute, and Bihar has long been the second largest producer of the fibre in the country after West Bengal.

The factory at Madhepura builds high powered electric locomotives for Indian Railways and is the largest new industrial unit in the north east of the state.

Banjari lies in Rohtas district, where the Kaimur hills carry the limestone that the cement works uses, and the same district once held the large paper and chemical complex of Dalmianagar.

Makhana is the puffed seed of the gorgon nut plant, grown in the shallow ponds of Darbhanga, Madhubani, Saharsa and Katihar, and almost all the makhana of the country comes from this part of Bihar.

The weavers of Bhagalpur have worked tussar silk for generations and the cloth is sold across the country as Bhagalpuri silk, which is why the city is called the silk city of Bihar.

Amjhor lies in Rohtas district in the Kaimur hills and holds the best known pyrite deposit of India.

The refinery of the Indian Oil Corporation at Barauni was built with Soviet assistance in the nineteen sixties and became the nucleus of the only heavy industrial cluster in the state, with a thermal power station, a fertiliser plant and a large dairy around it.

Jharkhand was carved out of the southern districts of Bihar on that day, which is also the birth anniversary of Birsa Munda, and the date is observed as the foundation day of the new state.