UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

A cyclone is a low pressure system, so air flows inwards towards the centre, and the Coriolis force deflects moving air to the left in the Southern Hemisphere, which turns that inflow into a clockwise spiral.

The India Meteorological Department attaches a colour to the severity of the expected weather so that an administration can act without reading the whole bulletin.

The warning comes in four stages, each tied to a number of hours before the adverse weather is expected on the coast.

The names themselves are contributed by the thirteen member countries of the panel, but the centre at New Delhi, which the India Meteorological Department runs, takes the next name from the list, announces it when a deep depression strengthens into a cyclonic storm, and issues advisories to all the member…

The eight countries of the WMO and ESCAP Panel on Tropical Cyclones agreed on a list of names for this basin and began using them in 2004, long after the Atlantic, where naming had been practice for decades.

The India Meteorological Department puts a system in the highest class, super cyclonic storm, when the sustained wind at its centre reaches 222 km/h, which is 120 knots.

A tropical cyclone runs on the latent heat released when water vapour condenses, so it needs a sea whose surface is at about 26.5 degrees Celsius or warmer, with that warm water reaching down about fifty metres, so that the churning of the sea does not cool the surface.

The Philippines lies in the western North Pacific, and every tropical cyclone of that basin, whether it strikes the Philippines, China or Japan, is called a typhoon.

These are the organs in which lymphocytes are produced and in which they mature into cells able to tell self from non-self; the B cells complete this training in the bone marrow and the T cells in the thymus, a gland behind the breastbone that shrinks with age.

The correct answer is B, the oral polio vaccine, which contains live poliovirus weakened so that it can multiply in the gut and raise immunity without causing the disease; it is the vaccine given as two drops in the pulse polio rounds.

The antibodies, mainly of the IgA class, come ready-made in the first milk, the colostrum, and the child's own immune system does no work, which is why the protection begins at once and lasts only a few months; antibodies of the IgG class reach the foetus through the placenta in…

On meeting an antigen a B lymphocyte multiplies and turns into a plasma cell, which pours out antibodies, that is immunoglobulins, into the blood; this arm of the defence is called humoral immunity, while T lymphocytes kill infected cells and regulate the response in cell-mediated immunity.

BCG stands for Bacillus Calmette-Guerin, a live but weakened strain of the bovine tuberculosis bacterium, and in India it is given soon after birth under the Universal Immunisation Programme, mainly to prevent the severe forms of childhood tuberculosis.

In 1796 Edward Jenner used matter from a cowpox sore to protect a boy against smallpox, the first vaccination in the modern sense, and the word vaccine comes from vacca, the Latin for cow.

The liver needs vitamin K to make prothrombin and several other clotting factors, so a deficiency of it lengthens the clotting time and causes bleeding; this is why a newborn is given vitamin K and why the vitamin is sometimes called the anti-haemorrhagic vitamin.

Landsteiner and Wiener found the antigen in 1940 while working with the blood of the rhesus monkey, and the first two letters of rhesus gave the factor its name; a person with the D antigen on the red cells is Rh positive and one without it is Rh negative.

A person of group AB carries both the A and the B antigen on the red cells, and because the body does not make antibodies against its own antigens, the plasma carries neither anti-A nor anti-B; blood of any group can therefore be transfused into such a person, who is…

The red cells of group O carry neither the A antigen nor the B antigen, so when they are transfused the antibodies in the recipient's plasma find nothing to bind to and the cells are not destroyed, which is why group O, and strictly O negative, can be given to…

The correct answer is A, Karl Landsteiner, the Austrian physician who found in 1900 that human blood falls into groups according to the antigens on the red cells, which made safe transfusion possible, and who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for it in 1930; with Wiener he…

The order is the Cornwallis Code (1793), the Vernacular Press Act (1878), the first Indian Factory Act (1881) and the Morley-Minto Reforms (1909).