UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

It is famous for its floor of hand-painted blue Chinese tiles, each of them different, its Belgian glass chandeliers, its clock tower and the copper plates recording the privileges granted to the Jewish community of the Malabar coast.

An Atash Behram is the highest of the three grades of Zoroastrian fire temple, and of the nine in the world eight are in India, at Udvada, Navsari, Surat and Mumbai, with the ninth at Yazd in Iran.

Its name means 'might of Islam', its screen of pointed arches was raised by masons trained in Indian temple technique, and the Iron Pillar stands in its courtyard.

The correct answer is A, Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, the saint who brought the Chishti order to India and settled at Ajmer, where his tomb became the best known dargah in the subcontinent; the annual Urs there draws pilgrims of every faith, and Mughal emperors from Akbar onwards made the journey.

Vasco da Gama died at Kochi in 1524 and was buried in this church, and his remains were moved to Portugal some years later, though the gravestone is still shown to visitors.

The basilica, completed in the opening years of the seventeenth century, is part of the Churches and Convents of Goa inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The gurdwara built on that site is Takht Sri Patna Sahib, one of the five Takhts, and the only one in Bihar.

The five Takhts, or seats of Sikh religious authority, must be learnt as a set, because the question is usually set by swapping one place for another.

The correct answer is B, Guru Arjan Dev, the fifth Guru, under whom the Harmandir Sahib was built and who had the Adi Granth compiled and installed in it in 1604, appointing Baba Buddha as its first granthi.

Founded in 1883, it is India's oldest conservation body, it works from Mumbai, and besides the popular magazine Hornbill it publishes a scientific journal and runs long-running bird and wildlife surveys; Salim Ali, the country's best known ornithologist, was associated with it for decades.

It was signed on 2 February 1971 in the Iranian city of Ramsar, which is why the treaty is always called the Ramsar Convention and why 2 February is kept as World Wetlands Day.

The Convention on Biological Diversity was opened for signature at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and came into force in 1993; its secretariat works from Montreal, and its two protocols are the Cartagena Protocol on biosafety and the Nagoya Protocol on access to genetic resources and the fair sharing…

The IPCC was created in 1988 so that governments would have an authoritative, regularly updated assessment of climate science; its secretariat is at Geneva, and it shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

WWF has published the Living Planet Report since the late 1990s, and its central measure, the Living Planet Index, tracks the average change in the size of monitored vertebrate populations.

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species was begun in 1964 and is the accepted global inventory of the conservation status of plants and animals.

IUCN was set up in 1948 at a conference held at Fontainebleau and was then called the International Union for the Protection of Nature; its headquarters later settled at Gland in Switzerland.

UNEP was created in 1972 after the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, and the decision to place it at Nairobi made it the first major United Nations programme headquartered in a developing country, a point examiners repeat often.

NDMA is the apex body for disaster management in India, created under the Disaster Management Act of 2005 and chaired by the Prime Minister; it frames policies and plans for prevention, mitigation and preparedness.

BirdLife International is a worldwide partnership of independent national conservation organisations, with its secretariat at Cambridge in the United Kingdom, so statement 1 is correct.

The Sangai, also called the dancing deer, is the state animal of Manipur and survives only in the floating meadows of the Keibul Lamjao National Park on Loktak Lake; the festival named after it is held in late November and shows the state's crafts, cuisine, indigenous sports and the Ras…