UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

A single proton, the nucleus of ordinary hydrogen, has a spin and therefore a magnetic moment, and hydrogen is by far the most abundant such nucleus in the body because the body is largely water and fat.

The cutoff or minimum wavelength of the continuous X-ray spectrum arises when an electron gives up its entire kinetic energy in a single collision with the target.

The Hounsfield unit, named after Godfrey Hounsfield, expresses how strongly a small volume of tissue attenuates X-rays, on a scale fixed by definition at zero for water and minus one thousand for air.

MRI works by placing the hydrogen nuclei of the body in a strong static magnetic field and disturbing them with radiofrequency pulses, which lie in the harmless low-energy part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Working with a discharge tube at the University of Wurzburg in November 1895, Roentgen noticed that a screen coated with a fluorescent salt glowed even when the tube was covered, and he traced the effect to an unknown penetrating radiation that he called X-radiation.

Faced with a steep fall in the water table around Chennai, the state amended its building rules in 2003 to require a rainwater harvesting structure in buildings, and it is cited as the first state in the country to make such harvesting compulsory.

The plan, released in 2008, set up eight national missions, among them the National Solar Mission, the National Mission for Enhanced Energy Efficiency, the National Water Mission, the National Mission for Sustaining the Himalayan Ecosystem, the National Mission for a Green India, the National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture, the National…

Mission Amrit Sarovar was launched on 24 April 2022, National Panchayati Raj Day, as part of the celebration of seventy-five years of independence, and the number 75 in the target of seventy-five ponds in every district of the country comes from that anniversary.

Atal Bhujal Yojana, launched in 2019 under the Ministry of Jal Shakti, is a central sector scheme part funded by the World Bank.

In 2019 the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation was merged with the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation to create a single Ministry of Jal Shakti, so that irrigation, river basins, groundwater, drinking water supply and sanitation would be handled by one ministry.

A surangam is a tunnel about two metres high cut nearly level into the side of a laterite hill until it meets a seepage zone; the water that oozes out of the rock trickles along the floor of the tunnel and is collected in a pit outside, so the structure…

In the cold desert of Ladakh there is very little rain, so the water that matters is glacier melt.

In the old Magadh region of south Bihar the land slopes gently and the soil holds water poorly, so farmers cut long channels, the pynes, from the flood flow of rivers such as the Phalgu, Sakri and Morhar and led the water across the fields.

In the Khasi and Jaintia hills, spring and stream water on a hill slope is tapped and carried through a network of split bamboo pipes, channels and diversion sticks that step the flow down the slope and finally release it drop by drop at the root of each betel vine…

Zabo, a word that means impounding runoff, is practised around Kikruma village in the Phek district of Nagaland.

A tanka is a covered underground tank, usually sunk in a courtyard or beneath a house in western Rajasthan, into which rain falling on the paved courtyard or the roof is led through a filter and stored for drinking right through the dry months.

The correct answer is B, Xuanzang, who travelled overland through Central Asia in the seventh century, spent years in India in the reign of Harshavardhana, studied at the monastery of Nalanda under Silabhadra, and carried manuscripts back to China, where he translated them and left the fullest foreign account of…

The name is the Thai form of Ayodhya, the city of Rama in the Ramayana, and it fits a court whose epic was the Ramakien and whose kings bore the title Rama.

It was translated into Pahlavi in the Persian empire and from that version into Arabic as Kalila wa Dimna, the two names being those of the jackals of the stories, and from Arabic it passed into Persian, Syriac, Hebrew, Greek and Latin and then into the languages of Europe.

The correct answer is C, Kanishka, the Kushan ruler who called the fourth Buddhist council in Kashmir and under whose empire, stretching from the Gangetic plain into Central Asia, Mahayana Buddhism and the Gandhara and Mathura styles of sculpture travelled up the trade routes to Khotan, Kucha and Dunhuang.