UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The Hornbill festival is held at Kisama near Kohima and opens on 1 December, the day Nagaland became a state in 1963; it brings the major Naga tribes together and is called the festival of festivals, and the hornbill of its name is the bird that appears in Naga headgear…

Majuli lies in the Brahmaputra in Assam, upstream of Jorhat, and is the largest river island; it is also the seat of the Vaishnavite satras founded in the tradition of Srimanta Sankardeva, and it was made a district of Assam, the first island district of the country.

Tripura juts into Bangladesh, which wraps around its north, west and south, so the state is joined to India only along its eastern side, where it meets Assam and Mizoram.

Article 371A was inserted when Nagaland was created and protects Naga customary law and practice, land and resources, so that an Act of Parliament on these matters applies to the state only if its Assembly so decides, and it gives the Governor a special responsibility for law and order.

Keibul Lamjao lies on the southern part of Loktak Lake near Imphal and floats on phumdis, the thick mats of soil and rotting plant matter that drift on the water.

Assam lies at the heart of the region and touches Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya and West Bengal, that is seven Indian states, besides the foreign neighbours Bhutan and Bangladesh.

The Council was set up by the North Eastern Council Act, 1971, started functioning in 1972 as the planning and advisory body for the region, and has had its secretariat at Shillong ever since; it works under the Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region.

The corridor runs through the northern districts of West Bengal around the town of Siliguri and is only about twenty kilometres wide at its narrowest, which is why it is nicknamed the Chicken's Neck.

Both had been Union Territories since 1972, Arunachal Pradesh after the North East Frontier Agency was renamed and Mizoram after the Mizo hills were separated from Assam, and both were raised to statehood on the same day in February 1987.

The Seven Sisters are Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura, the seven states that were carved out of the old Assam province and its Union Territories between 1963 and 1987.

The three dates of this one area are the whole question: the wildlife sanctuary was notified in 1978, the national park came in 1989 and the tiger reserve in 1990, so Option A and Option B are both true statements about Valmiki but answers to different questions, which is exactly…

The Chitwan national park of Nepal lies immediately across the border from Valmiki, so the two together form one continuous block of Terai forest and grassland; tigers, leopards and the occasional one-horned rhinoceros move between them, and the two countries manage the landscape as a shared corridor.

The house sparrow is the state bird, the peepal the state tree and the marigold the state flower, and exams often set all four in one question.

Both are small irrigation reservoirs in the hills of Jamui district in southern Bihar, built across seasonal streams, and over the years their shallow margins have become a winter home for thousands of waterbirds, including bar-headed geese; they were recognised as Ramsar sites in 2024 and were the state's second…

It is a great oxbow lake left behind by a shifting channel of the Burhi Gandak, one of the largest freshwater wetlands of the Ganga plain, and it fills every winter with migratory ducks, geese and waders while also supporting fishing and singhara cultivation by the villages around it.

The Bhimbandh sanctuary lies in the Kharagpur hills of Munger district and is famous for the hot springs that bubble out of its forest, the best known of them giving the place its name; pilgrims and visitors come for the water, which is believed to cure skin ailments.

The sanctuary was notified in 1991 on about fifty kilometres of the Ganga between Sultanganj and Kahalgaon in Bhagalpur district, and it takes its name from the ancient university of Vikramshila nearby.

The Kaimur wildlife sanctuary runs along the Kaimur plateau in Kaimur and Rohtas districts in the south-west of the state and is the largest sanctuary of Bihar, a dry deciduous forest of sal, khair and bamboo with gorges, waterfalls and rock paintings in its hills.

The reserve occupies the north-western corner of Bihar in West Champaran, where the Himalayan foothills of the Someshwar and Dun ranges meet the Gandak, and its northern boundary is the international border with Nepal.

Valmiki in West Champaran district is the only national park of Bihar and also its only tiger reserve: the sanctuary was notified in 1978, the national park declared in 1989 and the tiger reserve in 1990.