UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The Survey is an attached office of that ministry, has its head office in New Delhi and divides the country into circles, each under a Superintending Archaeologist, which look after the monuments and sites declared to be of national importance.

An engineer of the Bengal Engineers who had surveyed Sarnath and Sanchi long before the Survey existed, he was appointed its first Archaeological Surveyor in 1861 and its first Director-General in 1871, and he used the travel accounts of the Chinese pilgrims Faxian and Xuanzang to identify ancient cities with…

The Survey was set up in that year, in the first years of Crown rule after the revolt of 1857, with Alexander Cunningham as its first Archaeological Surveyor, and it was reorganised as a full department with Cunningham as Director-General in 1871.

Connell showed in the field that on the intertidal rocks of the Scottish coast the larger and faster-growing barnacle Balanus physically crowds out the smaller Chathamalus wherever the two settle together, so that Chathamalus survives only higher up the shore where Balanus cannot tolerate the exposure.

In a mycorrhiza the threads of a fungus grow around or inside the fine roots of a plant and greatly extend the surface from which minerals, especially phosphorus, can be absorbed from the soil.

Brood parasitism is the habit of laying eggs in the nest of another species and letting the host bird incubate them and feed the young.

In amensalism one species is harmed while the other neither gains nor loses, a pattern written as minus and zero.

Rhizobium lives inside the nodules on the roots of legumes such as gram, pea, groundnut and arhar. The bacterium converts atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, a form the plant can absorb and build into proteins, while the plant supplies the bacterium with shelter and with sugars made in photosynthesis.

Robert Paine removed the predatory starfish Pisaster from rocky intertidal pools and found that within a short time the mussels it had been eating took over the rock surface and crowded out other animals, so that more than ten invertebrate species were lost from the pools.

The Russian ecologist G. F. Gause worked with cultures of Paramecium and concluded that when two species need exactly the same limited resource in the same space, one of them is always eliminated in the long run; this is the competitive exclusion principle, also called Gause's principle.

Prickly pear cactus was taken to Australia in the nineteenth century and spread uncontrollably over grazing land because no local animal fed on it.

The egret walks beside grazing cattle and feeds on the grasshoppers and other insects flushed out of the grass by the cattle's hooves.

Cuscuta, known as dodder or amarbel, is a flowering plant that has lost its chlorophyll and its leaves and cannot make its own food.

A lichen is a close partnership between an alga and a fungus in which both partners gain. The alga prepares carbohydrates by photosynthesis and shares them with the fungus, while the fungus absorbs and holds water and minerals and anchors the pair to bare rock or tree bark.

The fifteen themes identified under Swadesh Darshan are tied to faith, nature, culture and landscape, and industry is not among them.

Dekho Apna Desh was launched by the Ministry of Tourism in January 2020 to persuade Indian travellers to see their own country first, and it became better known through a long series of webinars on Indian destinations, crafts and cuisines that were held when travel was restricted.

Seva Bhoj Yojana was begun in 2018 by the Ministry of Culture to lighten the burden on temples, gurudwaras, dargahs, churches, monasteries and other charitable religious institutions that distribute free food, known as prasad, langar or bhandara, by reimbursing the central share of the goods and services tax paid on…

National Tourism Day is observed in India on 25 January every year to spread awareness of the importance of tourism for the economy and for employment, and the Ministry of Tourism marks it with a theme and with events at destinations.

The original Swadesh Darshan spread its money along fifteen themed circuits, each linking several places and often several states, and experience showed that the spending became thin and scattered.

Incredible India was launched by the Ministry of Tourism in 2002 as an international marketing campaign, and its advertisements in foreign magazines and on television turned Indian tourism into a recognised brand, with the exclamation mark in the logo forming the letter I. The campaign has since had further editions.