UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The British geneticist Alec Jeffreys developed DNA fingerprinting in 1984 by studying short repeated sequences that vary in number from person to person, and the method is now used in criminal investigation, in disputes about parentage and in identifying victims of accidents and disasters.

Dolly was a sheep produced at the Roslin Institute in Scotland in 1996 by the technique of somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which the nucleus of an udder cell of one sheep was placed in an egg whose own nucleus had been removed, so the lamb carried the genes of…

The polymerase chain reaction repeats three steps, denaturation at a high temperature, annealing of short primers and extension of the new strand, so the enzyme must survive near boiling water; Taq polymerase, obtained from the bacterium Thermus aquaticus of hot springs, does exactly that and lets a single DNA segment…

Golden Rice carries genes that let the grain make beta carotene, the orange pigment that the human body converts into vitamin A, and the colour of the grain gives the variety its name; the aim is to reduce night blindness and childhood blindness in populations whose diet is mainly rice.

The genes called cry genes are taken from Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterium of the soil that forms protein crystals during its spore stage.

This soil bacterium naturally transfers a part of its tumour inducing plasmid, called the Ti plasmid, into the cells of a dicotyledonous plant and causes crown gall disease; genetic engineers disarm the plasmid, insert the gene they want and use the bacterium as a vector, which is why it is…

A restriction endonuclease recognises a short palindromic sequence in DNA and cuts both strands there, leaving sticky ends that can pair with another piece cut by the same enzyme; Hind II was the first such enzyme to be discovered and EcoRI from Escherichia coli is the most widely used.

The correct answer is B, Maharashtra, which set up its Lokayukta in 1971 and so was the first State where the institution actually began to work.

The Central Vigilance Commission Act, 2003 places the superintendence of the CBI in cases under the Prevention of Corruption Act with the Commission, a direct result of the Vineet Narain judgment, while the general administration of the CBI remains with the Department of Personnel and Training under the Ministry of…

The CBI was created on 1 April 1963 by a resolution of the Ministry of Home Affairs, and because a resolution cannot confer police powers, it exercises the powers of the Special Police Establishment under the Act of 1946, whose ancestor was the war-time body of 1941 that investigated bribery…

The Commission worked for nearly four decades on the strength of an executive resolution alone.

The Committee on Prevention of Corruption, chaired by K. Santhanam, reported in the early nineteen sixties and recommended an apex vigilance body free of departmental control, and the government set up the Central Vigilance Commission by a resolution in February 1964.

The Act bars the Lokpal from entertaining a complaint if more than seven years have passed since the offence complained of was committed, a period of limitation meant to keep the body from being used for very old disputes.

The selection committee is chaired by the Prime Minister and has four other members, namely the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, the Chief Justice of India or a judge of the Supreme Court nominated by him, and one eminent jurist recommended…

The Act fixes the tenure of the chairperson and of every member of the Lokpal at five years from the date of entering office, or until the holder turns seventy, whichever comes first, and they are not eligible for reappointment.

The Act provides for a chairperson and not more than eight members, so the full body can have nine persons.

The jurist and parliamentarian Lakshmi Mall Singhvi suggested the Indian name Lokpal in 1963 for the institution that Scandinavian countries call the Ombudsman, and the name stuck.

Parliament passed the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act in December 2013; it received the assent of the President on 1 January 2014 and came into force on 16 January 2014.

The correct answer is B, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who founded the Servants of India Society at Poona in 1905 to train men who would devote their lives to public service on small salaries, and who was the moderate leader Gandhi acknowledged as his political guru.

He became the youngest president of the Indian National Congress in 1923 and later the first Education Minister of independent India, whose birthday is observed as National Education Day.