UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

These are the two general purpose detectors on the LHC ring, and in July 2012 both independently reported a new particle of about 125 giga-electronvolts that matched the Higgs boson, the particle linked to the field that gives mass to other particles; the Nobel Prize in Physics of 2013 went…

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, founded in 1954, has its campus at Meyrin on the outskirts of Geneva in Switzerland, and because its tunnels run under the border, parts of the laboratory lie in France as well.

The Large Hadron Collider occupies a circular tunnel about 27 kilometres around, lying roughly 100 metres below the ground on the Swiss-French border near Geneva, and it is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator ever built; the tunnel was originally dug for an earlier CERN machine, the Large Electron-Positron…

The three language formula, recommended by the Kothari Commission and adopted in the National Policy on Education, places the mother tongue or the regional language first, Hindi second and English third in Hindi-speaking states, while non-Hindi states teach the regional language, Hindi and English; in practice some states substitute another…

The movement forced the government to appoint the States Reorganisation Commission under Fazl Ali, whose report of 1955 led to the States Reorganisation Act of 1956 and to a map drawn largely along language lines.

Inserted by the Seventh Amendment Act of 1956, it provides for a Special Officer for Linguistic Minorities appointed by the President to investigate all matters relating to the safeguards given to linguistic minorities and to report to the President, who causes the report to be laid before Parliament; the officer…

The islands lie off the Kerala coast, their people speak a dialect close to Malayalam except on Minicoy, where Mahl is spoken, and the administration works in Malayalam along with English.

Uttarakhand made Sanskrit its second official language in 2010 and Himachal Pradesh followed in 2019, both keeping Hindi as the first official language; the step is largely symbolic but is asked very often.

The Goa, Daman and Diu Official Language Act of 1987 made Konkani the official language, and the same year Goa became a full state; the script is specified because Konkani is written in more than one script.

The state has many tribal languages and no single dominant tongue, so English, already the language of administration and of education through the churches and schools, was adopted as the official language; Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya have done the same, Meghalaya using Khasi and Garo as associate languages.

The correct answer is C, the Ninety-second Amendment, passed in 2003, which took the Eighth Schedule from eighteen languages to twenty-two by adding Bodo of Assam, Dogri of the Jammu region, Maithili of Bihar and Santhali, the language of the Santhal people spread over Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha.

The Eighth Schedule began with fourteen languages in 1950, and three amendments took the list to twenty-two: Sindhi in 1967, Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali in 1992, and Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali by the Ninety-second Amendment passed in 2003.

It allows the legislature of a state to adopt by law any one or more of the languages in use in that state, or Hindi, as the language or languages to be used for all or any of the official purposes of that state, and until it does so English…

It says that the official language of the Union shall be Hindi in the Devanagari script and that the international form of Indian numerals shall be used, with English to continue for fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution; the Official Languages Act, 1963 then allowed English to continue…

Bakhira, in Sant Kabir Nagar district of eastern Uttar Pradesh, is the largest natural lake of the state. It is protected as a bird sanctuary for the migratory birds that winter there and is also listed as a Ramsar wetland of international importance.

The Yamuna rises at the Yamunotri glacier in Uttarakhand, flows past Delhi, Mathura and Agra and joins the Ganga at Prayagraj after a course of more than thirteen hundred kilometres, which makes it the longest tributary of the Ganga.

The Upper Ganga Canal, designed by Proby Cautley and opened in 1854, leaves the Ganga at Haridwar and waters the upper Ganga-Yamuna Doab through Meerut, Bulandshahr and Aligarh.

The Rihand dam in Sonbhadra district of Uttar Pradesh holds back the Rihand river, a tributary of the Sone, and its reservoir, named Govind Ballabh Pant Sagar after the state's first chief minister, is the largest man-made lake in India by surface area.

Pachnada, in Etawah district, takes its name from the meeting of five streams, where the Chambal joins the Yamuna along with the Sindh, the Kwari and the Pahuj.

The Betwa rises on the Vindhyan plateau in Madhya Pradesh, flows north-east across Bundelkhand past Jhansi and Orchha and joins the Yamuna at Hamirpur.