UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The National Food Security Act, often called the Right to Food Act, was passed by Parliament in 2013 and converted the subsidised grain of the Targeted Public Distribution System from a scheme benefit into a legal entitlement, enforceable through a District Grievance Redressal Officer and a State Food Commission.

Each of the three grew around a factory: Jamshedpur around the steel works set up by the Tata enterprise, Bhilai around the public sector steel plant built with Soviet collaboration, and Modinagar around the industries of the Modi group, so industry is their dominant function.

A dispersed or isolated pattern, in which a farmstead or two or three houses stand far from the next, is found where the terrain is broken and the patches of cultivable land are small and scattered, as in Meghalaya, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and the hills of Kerala.

An urban agglomeration is the built-up whole rather than the municipal unit: it is a town together with its outgrowths, or two or more physically contiguous towns with their outgrowths, where an outgrowth is a clearly identifiable area such as a railway colony, a university campus, a port area or…

At the Census of 2011 about sixty-two per cent of Goa's population lived in urban areas, the highest share among the states, followed by Mizoram at about fifty-two per cent and Tamil Nadu at about forty-eight per cent.

Migration is studied through push factors in the place of origin and pull factors in the place of destination, and all three items listed belong to that study.

The Seventy-fourth Constitutional Amendment Act of 1992 inserted Part IXA into the Constitution with Articles 243P to 243ZG, gave municipalities a fixed term of five years with elections conducted by a State Election Commission, provided for reservation of seats, and added the Twelfth Schedule listing eighteen subjects for urban local…

The Scottish geographer and town planner Patrick Geddes coined the word conurbation in 1915 for a great urban mass formed when separate towns grow outward until their built-up areas merge, as in Greater London or the Ruhr.

Statement B is sound: for the poor and for people of the lower castes, the new jobs in colonial cities were a way out of the control of upper-caste landowners in the village and of the daily humiliation they suffered there, and this pull is part of every account of…

Where water is abundant and flooding is a danger, people avoid the low wet land and build on the levee, the terrace or any patch of higher dry ground, and such a site is called a dry point.

The Census of India groups towns into six classes by population: Class I of one hundred thousand and above, Class II of fifty thousand to ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, Class III of twenty thousand to forty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, Class IV of ten thousand to nineteen…

The Ganga-Yamuna Doab is a level alluvial plain with deep fertile soil, assured water from wells, canals and a high water table, and a long history of dense farming settlement, so its villages are compact or nucleated: the houses stand packed together in one block with narrow lanes, and the…

A place that has a municipal corporation, a municipality, a cantonment board or a notified town area committee is a statutory town, and it is urban whatever its population; it is therefore not a census town at all.

Wool is the fleece of sheep and other animals and is made of the protein keratin, so it is a protein fibre; silk, which is the protein fibroin, is the other natural fibre of this kind, and both come from animals.

Bakelite is a phenol-formaldehyde resin, prepared by condensing phenol with formaldehyde; on curing the chains cross-link into a rigid network, giving a hard, heat-resistant and electrically insulating solid used for switches, plug tops, pan handles and distributor caps.

Thermocol is polystyrene expanded with a blowing agent so that the solid becomes a rigid foam of tiny closed cells.

Buna-S, also called styrene-butadiene rubber, is made by copolymerising 1,3-butadiene with styrene; the S in the name stands for styrene.

Rayon is made by dissolving the cellulose of wood pulp, forcing the solution through fine holes and regenerating the cellulose as a thread.

Polyvinyl chloride has linear chains held to one another only by weak forces, so it softens when heated and hardens when cooled and can be melted and moulded again and again; that reversibility is what makes a plastic thermoplastic, and it is also what allows such plastics to be recycled…

Vulcanisation is the heating of raw rubber with sulphur, which forms short cross-links between the long isoprene chains. Raw rubber is soft, sticky when warm and brittle when cold; the vulcanised product is strong, far more elastic and stable over a wide range of temperature.