UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The Aravalli trends from south-west to north-east, which is roughly the direction in which the Arabian Sea branch of the monsoon travels.

The Bhorat plateau is the high, flat tract of the southern Aravalli lying between Gogunda in Udaipur district and Kumbhalgarh in Rajsamand, with an average height above twelve hundred metres.

A barchan is a crescent-shaped dune with a gentle windward slope and a steep slip face, its two horns pointing downwind, and it migrates as sand is carried over the crest.

The canal, originally called the Rajasthan Canal and renamed after Indira Gandhi, begins at the Harike barrage in Punjab, built just below the point where the Beas joins the Sutlej, and carries water about 649 kilometres through Sri Ganganagar, Hanumangarh, Bikaner and Jaisalmer.

The Desert National Park covers about 3,162 square kilometres in the Jaisalmer and Barmer districts and protects the sand dunes, salt flats and thorn scrub of the Thar along with the great Indian bustard, called godawan locally, which is the state bird of Rajasthan.

Sambhar lake spreads across the Jaipur and Nagaur districts of Rajasthan and is the largest inland salt-water lake in India, a major source of common salt and a wetland where flamingos gather in winter.

The Luni rises in the Naga hills near Ajmer in the Aravalli, flows south-west through Pali, Jodhpur, Barmer and Jalore and loses itself in the marshes of the Rann of Kachchh in Gujarat.

The Aravalli was folded in Precambrian times, long before the Himalaya existed, and hundreds of millions of years of erosion have worn it down to a chain of residual hills whose rocks carry zinc, lead, copper and marble.

Guru Shikhar stands on Mount Abu in Sirohi district and, at 1,722 metres, is the highest point of the Aravalli Range and of Rajasthan.

Lakshadweep has no High Court of its own and falls under the jurisdiction of the Kerala High Court at Kochi, which is the nearest mainland coast and the state whose language, Malayalam, the islanders speak.

Agatti has the only airport of Lakshadweep, so every visitor who flies to the territory lands there and travels on to other islands by boat or helicopter.

The group became a union territory on 1 November 1956 under the States Reorganisation Act, when it was separated from the Malabar district of the old Madras State, and it carried the long name Laccadive, Minicoy and Amindivi Islands until 1973, when it was renamed Lakshadweep.

Pitti is a tiny uninhabited rock and sandbank in the Lakshadweep group, declared a bird sanctuary because terns, including the sooty tern and the brown noddy, nest there in large numbers.

The thirty-six islands, reefs and banks of Lakshadweep together have a land area of only thirty-two square kilometres, the smallest of any state or union territory of India.

Lakshadweep is made up of thirty-six islands, reefs and submerged banks, of which ten are inhabited: Kavaratti, Agatti, Amini, Kadmat, Kiltan, Chetlat, Bitra, Andrott, Kalpeni and Minicoy.

Minicoy, the southernmost island of Lakshadweep, stands apart in language and culture from the rest of the territory.

The Nine Degree Channel runs between Minicoy, the southernmost island of Lakshadweep, and the main body of the group to its north, where Kalpeni lies.

Andrott, spread over about 4.9 square kilometres, is the largest island of Lakshadweep and also the closest to the Kerala coast.

Kavaratti is the capital and administrative headquarters of Lakshadweep, the seat of the Administrator appointed by the President, and the island where the naval base INS Dweeprakshak was commissioned in 2012.

The Palghat gap, about thirty kilometres wide in Palakkad district of Kerala, is the broadest break in the whole chain and carries the road and the railway line that join Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu to Palakkad and Thrissur in Kerala.