UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Fort St George was built by the East India Company at Madras in the 1640s and was the first English fort in India; the settlement that grew around it became the Madras presidency.

The palace was built in the nineteenth century for the Nawab Nazim of Bengal on the bank of the Bhagirathi, and takes its name from its very large number of doorways, many of them false, which is the detail questions turn on.

The palace stands in Kanyakumari district of Tamil Nadu, although it was the seat of the rulers of Travancore and is to this day maintained by the Government of Kerala, a division that followed the reorganisation of states.

The correct answer is B, Raigad, which Shivaji made his capital and where his coronation took place in 1674, the ceremony at which he took the title Chhatrapati.

Golconda, on the edge of Hyderabad, was the capital of the Qutb Shahi rulers before they moved down to the new city; it was the market through which the diamonds of the region were traded, and its acoustics are famous, a clap at the Fateh Darwaza being heard at the…

The correct answer is B, Sawai Pratap Singh, who had the Hawa Mahal built in 1799 as a screen of small windows and jharokhas through which the women of the household could watch the processions in the street below without being seen.

The Vijay Stambha was raised by Rana Kumbha of Mewar to mark a victory, and the Kirti Stambha, the tower of fame, stands in the same fort, so a question may ask for either.

The correct answer is A, Chittorgarh Fort, which spreads over the largest area of any fort in the country and holds within it palaces, tanks and temples as well as the Vijay Stambha and the Kirti Stambha.

The correct answer is C, Shah Jahan, who built the Red Fort of red sandstone as the citadel of his new capital Shahjahanabad, completing it in 1648; the Diwan-i-Aam, the Diwan-i-Khas, the Rang Mahal and the Moti Masjid stand inside, and it was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in…

In December 2020 Nepal and China announced a jointly agreed new height for Mount Everest of 8,848.86 metres, after separate surveys from the two sides.

Shiva Keshavan, from Himachal Pradesh, competed in the luge at six Winter Olympic Games beginning in 1998 and won titles at the Asian level, which makes him India's best known winter Olympian.

Beijing hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008 and the Winter Olympics in 2022, becoming the first city to have held both.

The Himalayan Mountaineering Institute was founded at Darjeeling in West Bengal in 1954, the year after the first ascent of Everest, and Tenzing Norgay served as its first director of field training.

Annapurna I, 8,091 metres high and the lowest of the fourteen eight-thousanders, was climbed in 1950 by a French expedition led by Maurice Herzog, three years before Everest; it remains one of the most dangerous of the fourteen.

Nanda Devi, 7,816 metres high, stands in Uttarakhand and is the highest peak lying wholly inside India.

In the biathlon a competitor skis a cross-country course and stops at a range to shoot at targets, with a penalty of extra distance or time for each miss; the sport grew out of military patrol skiing in Scandinavia.

In skeleton the athlete lies face down and head first on a small sled and steers it down an ice track by shifting body weight.

She reached the summit of Everest on 23 May 1984 as a member of an Indian expedition and became the first Indian woman and the fifth woman in the world to do so.

They reached the summit on 29 May 1953 as part of a British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt; Hillary was a New Zealander and Tenzing Norgay a Sherpa who later became the first director of field training at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling.

The first Winter Olympic Games were held at Chamonix in the French Alps in 1924, the same year as the Paris Summer Olympics, and were recognised retrospectively by the International Olympic Committee as the first Winter Games.