UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The correct answer is B, Bodhidharma, remembered in tradition as a prince of the Pallava country in south India who travelled to China and taught a path resting on meditation rather than on scripture; the school he founded is Chan in Chinese and Zen in Japanese, and legend attaches him…

The kingdom of Champa held the central coast of what is now Vietnam for many centuries, used Sanskrit in its inscriptions and built brick temples to Shiva, of which the group at My Son is the largest and is a World Heritage site.

The two giant Buddhas were carved into a cliff in the Bamiyan valley, on the branch of the Silk Route that carried Buddhism from Gandhara into Central Asia, and they were destroyed in 2001; the valley remains on the World Heritage list for the surviving caves and paintings.

Ashoka sent his son Mahendra, known in the Pali chronicles as Mahinda, to Sri Lanka, where the king of the island received the teaching, and afterwards the nun Sanghamitra came with a branch of the Bodhi tree, which was planted at Anuradhapura.

The Ramakien is the Thai retelling of the Ramayana, painted along the galleries of the Emerald Buddha temple at Bangkok and performed in masked dance; the kings of the present Thai dynasty take the title Rama from it, and the old capital Ayutthaya is named after Ayodhya.

Borobudur was built in the eighth and ninth centuries by the Sailendra rulers of Java as a Buddhist monument in the form of a stepped pyramid whose galleries carry carved panels of the life and teaching of the Buddha, with seated Buddha images in open stupas on the upper terraces.

The Khmer king Suryavarman II raised Angkor Wat in the twelfth century in what is now Cambodia as a temple of Vishnu, and its scale makes it the largest Vishnu temple in the world; the building later came to be used as a Buddhist shrine and now appears on the…

India keeps 2 December as National Pollution Control Day because the leak of methyl isocyanate at Bhopal began on the night of 2 December 1984; the day is used to review pollution control laws and to remember those killed.

Parliament passed it under Article 253, to give effect to the Stockholm Conference decisions, and in the direct shadow of the Bhopal leak of December 1984.

The Tohoku earthquake of 11 March 2011 shut the reactors down as designed, but the tsunami that arrived minutes later flooded the emergency diesel generators at the Fukushima Daiichi plant on Japan's Pacific coast.

From 5 to 9 December 1952 an anticyclone settled over London, a temperature inversion trapped the smoke and sulphur dioxide of domestic coal fires, and the resulting smog killed thousands.

The Minamata Convention on Mercury was adopted at Kumamoto, Japan, in 2013 and entered into force in 2017.

Mining waste carrying cadmium entered the Jinzu river in Toyama Prefecture and reached people through irrigated rice and drinking water.

The Chisso Corporation discharged methylmercury compounds into Minamata Bay in Kumamoto Prefecture; the mercury accumulated through fish and shellfish into the people who ate them and attacked the central nervous system, producing numbness, loss of coordination, blindness and congenital deformity.

Reactor Number 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the town of Pripyat, exploded on 26 April 1986. The site then lay in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the USSR and lies in independent Ukraine today, which is why the question is usually framed as present-day country.

The leak at the Union Carbide India Limited plant in Bhopal began late on 2 December 1984 and the gas spread through the early hours of 3 December, which is why India observes 2 December as National Pollution Control Day.

Methyl isocyanate, or MIC, was stored at the Union Carbide India Limited plant in Bhopal as an intermediate for making the pesticide carbaryl.

The two manuscripts were inscribed on the International Register in April 2025 on a nomination made by the Ministry of Culture, and both are in the custody of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune.

The Rigveda manuscripts, preserved at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, were inscribed on the International Register in 2007 as a record of one of the oldest surviving bodies of religious poetry anywhere.

UNESCO set up the Memory of the World Programme in 1992, after recognising that war, neglect, damp, insects and illegal trade were destroying archives and manuscript collections across the world.