UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The Purvanchal Expressway runs about 340.8 kilometres from the Lucknow area to Ghazipur in the eastern part of the state and includes a runway stretch on which air force aircraft can land in an emergency, a feature that made it a favourite with question setters.

The BRO was raised in 1960 to build and maintain the roads of the frontier regions, works under the Ministry of Defence, and has to its credit the Atal Tunnel under the Rohtang Pass as well as some of the highest motorable roads in Ladakh.

In the system adopted in 2010, highways whose general alignment is east to west carry odd numbers, while those running north to south carry even numbers.

The National Highways Authority of India Act was passed in 1988, and the authority it created became operational in 1995; it develops, maintains and manages the National Highways entrusted to it and is the body behind the Golden Quadrilateral and most of the country's expressways, working under the Ministry of…

The Atal Tunnel is 9.02 kilometres long, was built by the Border Roads Organisation and was inaugurated on 3 October 2020; it connects Manali with the Lahaul valley on the way to Leh, shortens the journey considerably and keeps the route open through the winter months when the pass above…

It was the first road in India built as a six-lane concrete expressway with fully controlled access, no crossings at grade and no entry for slow-moving traffic, and it crosses the Sahyadri through a series of tunnels and viaducts.

The Golden Quadrilateral, the first and best known phase of the National Highways Development Project, is a four-lane and six-lane ring of about 5,846 kilometres joining the four metropolitan cities, and it is the single most asked fact in this chapter.

NH-44 begins at Srinagar in the Kashmir valley and ends at Kanyakumari at the southern tip of the peninsula, covering about 3,745 kilometres and passing through Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

It was created in the renumbering of 2010 by merging several older highways, including the old NH-1A, NH-1, NH-2, NH-3, NH-75, NH-26 and NH-7, and it passes through about a dozen states and union territories.

G. Evelyn Hutchinson distinguished the fundamental niche, which is the full range of conditions and resources a species could use if nothing interfered, from the realised niche, which is the narrower part left to it once competitors, predators, parasites and disease are at work.

A keystone species holds the structure of its community together out of all proportion to its own numbers, exactly as the keystone at the top of an arch holds the stones in place.

Where conditions stay constant and the resource is limiting, the better competitor increases while the weaker one dies out or shifts its niche.

A lichen is a partnership of an alga and a fungus that takes its water and minerals straight from the air, having no protective cuticle and no roots.

Paine introduced the term in 1969 after an experiment on the rocky Pacific shore in which he removed the starfish Pisaster ochraceus from study plots.

An ecotone is the zone where two adjoining ecosystems meet and blend, such as the mangrove belt between land and sea, an estuary between a river and the ocean, or the strip where grassland gives way to forest.

Oceans cover close to seventy-one per cent of the earth's surface and hold about ninety-seven per cent of its water, which makes the marine ecosystem the largest on the planet by both area and volume.

An artificial or man-made ecosystem is one that people create and keep going by their own effort, deciding which species live in it and supplying water, nutrients and protection.

Abiotic components are the non-living parts of an ecosystem, and soil belongs squarely to that list along with sunlight, temperature, water, air, minerals and pH.

An ecosystem is a working unit in which a community of living organisms interacts with the non-living surroundings in a given area, so it must contain both halves.

Akbar raised the Buland Darwaza, the lofty southern gateway of the Jama Masjid at Fatehpur Sikri, in 1601 to mark his conquest of Gujarat, and it ranks among the tallest gateways in the world, approached by a long flight of steps and faced in red sandstone inlaid with white marble.