Static general knowledge is six of the seven lines of the General Studies Paper-I syllabus in the UPSC CSE notice: History of India and the Indian National Movement; Indian and World Geography; Indian Polity and Governance; Economic and Social Development; Environmental Ecology, Bio-diversity and Climate Change; and General Science. The Commission tests understanding rather than recall, through statements to be judged correct or incorrect, pairs to be matched and assertion-reason items, and it likes the edges of a topic: a lesser-known provision of the Constitution, a river's tributary, a species' conservation status, the mandate of a statutory body. This page holds GK24's topic-wise GK notes for UPSC, written as short facts and tables, in English and Hindi, with each note linked to the current affairs and previous-year questions on the same topic. Start with Polity and Modern History, which carry the most questions, then Geography, the Economy, Environment, Ancient and Medieval culture and Science. Read a note, solve its PYQs, take its quiz, and come back to it in your monthly revision. A candidate who knows these notes and reads the daily current affairs has covered the syllabus the notice prescribes for Paper-I.
The climate of Bihar is best described as:
Bihar lies in the northern plain, where summers are hot, the rain comes in a single spell from the south-west monsoon between mid-June and early October, and winters are cool and dry with occasional cold waves.
Read the full explanation →The Sapt Kosi is formed by the union of the Sun Kosi, the Arun and which third main stream?
The Kosi is called the Sapt Kosi because seven head streams gather in the Nepal Himalaya to make it, and of these the three main ones are the Sun Kosi from the west, the Arun from the north and the Tamur from the east.
Read the full explanation →The Phalgu river, associated with the tarpan rituals of Pitrapaksha, flows past which city of Bihar?
The Phalgu, or Falgu, is formed by the union of the Lilajan and the Mohana a little above Gaya and flows past the city with a wide bed that stays sandy and dry for most of the year.
Read the full explanation →In Bihar, the shallow saucer-shaped waterlogged depressions of the northern plain, in which makhana is grown, are called:
A chaur is a shallow, saucer-shaped basin in the flat North Bihar plain that holds water for much of the year because the land has almost no slope and the rivers have raised their own beds.
Read the full explanation →The Vikramshila Gangetic Dolphin Sanctuary is situated on the Ganga in which district of Bihar?
The sanctuary was notified in 1991 along a stretch of about sixty kilometres of the Ganga between Sultanganj and Kahalgaon in Bhagalpur district.
Read the full explanation →The devastating Kosi flood of August 2008 was caused by a breach in the river's eastern embankment at:
In August 2008 the eastern embankment of the Kosi gave way at Kusaha, upstream of the Bhimnagar barrage and inside Nepal.
Read the full explanation →Which river flows along the western boundary of Bihar with Uttar Pradesh and joins the Ganga near Chausa in Buxar district?
The Karmanasa rises on the Kaimur plateau, flows north along part of the boundary between Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and meets the Ganga near Chausa in Buxar district, the same place at which the Ganga enters Bihar.
Read the full explanation →The Kosi barrage, built under the India-Nepal Kosi agreement of 1954, is situated at:
The Kosi project that followed the 1954 agreement between India and Nepal has three parts: a barrage at Bhimnagar on the border, long embankments on both banks of the river downstream, and canals, of which the Eastern Kosi Main Canal is the largest.
Read the full explanation →Kabartal (Kanwar Lake), the first Ramsar site of Bihar, is located in which district?
Kabartal, also called Kanwar Jheel, lies in Begusarai district and is an ox-bow lake left behind by the Burhi Gandak.
Read the full explanation →Which is the largest southern tributary of the Ganga in Bihar?
The Son rises at Amarkantak in Madhya Pradesh, the same plateau that gives birth to the Narmada, flows north-east through Rohtas and joins the Ganga near Maner, a little west of Patna.
Read the full explanation →The Gandak river joins the Ganga at which place?
The Gandak rises in Nepal, where it is called the Narayani or the Sapt Gandaki, enters Bihar at Valmikinagar in West Champaran and flows south-east to meet the Ganga at Sonpur, across the river from Patna.
Read the full explanation →The Ganga enters Bihar near which of the following places?
The Ganga comes into Bihar from Uttar Pradesh near Chausa, flows from west to east for about 445 kilometres and leaves the state for West Bengal near Rajmahal, splitting Bihar into the North Bihar plain and the South Bihar plain on the way.
Read the full explanation →Which river is known as the 'Sorrow of Bihar'?
The Kosi earns the name because it brings an exceptionally heavy load of silt down from Nepal, drops it the moment it reaches the flat North Bihar plain, raises its own bed above the surrounding land and then breaks out into a new channel.
Read the full explanation →The main detector planned for the India-based Neutrino Observatory in Theni district is
Placed in a cavern under about 1,300 metres of rock at Pottipuram in the Bodi West Hills, it is designed to catch atmospheric neutrinos and measure how they change from one flavour to another, the phenomenon of neutrino oscillation; the magnetic field lets it tell a neutrino from an antineutrino.
Read the full explanation →LIGO-India, the third detector of the LIGO network, is being set up at which place?
The site was chosen for its flat, seismically quiet ground, the Union Cabinet approved the project in principle in 2016 and in full in April 2023, and it is being executed by the Department of Atomic Energy and the Department of Science and Technology with IPR, RRCAT Indore and IUCAA…
Read the full explanation →Gravitational waves, first detected by LIGO in September 2015, had been predicted a century earlier by whom?
Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time thrown out by violent events such as the merger of two black holes, and they follow from the general theory of relativity that Einstein published in 1915, with the prediction of the waves set out in 1916.
Read the full explanation →During a nuclear fusion reaction -
Fusion is the joining of two light nuclei into a heavier one, with a neutron or other products released and a large amount of energy appearing because the mass of the product is slightly less than the mass of the reactants; in ITER the reaction fuses deuterium and tritium into…
Read the full explanation →Hydrogen bomb is based on which Nuclear process?
A hydrogen bomb, also called a thermonuclear bomb, uses a fission explosion only as a trigger; the main energy comes from the fusion of the heavy hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium into helium at temperatures of millions of degrees, which is why the process is described as thermonuclear or thermal…
Read the full explanation →India contribution to ITER is delivered by ITER-India, a unit of which institution?
This institute of the Department of Atomic Energy is the national centre for plasma and fusion research, it houses the domestic agency ITER-India that supplies India share of the machine, and it operates India own tokamaks Aditya and SST-1, the Steady State Superconducting Tokamak.
Read the full explanation →The ITER project, the world largest fusion experiment, is being built in which country?
ITER is coming up at Saint-Paul-les-Durance in the Cadarache area of southern France, and its seven partners are the European Union, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States; the name is the Latin word for the way.
Read the full explanation →