Static general knowledge is six of the seven lines of the General Studies Paper-I syllabus in the UPSC CSE notice: History of India and the Indian National Movement; Indian and World Geography; Indian Polity and Governance; Economic and Social Development; Environmental Ecology, Bio-diversity and Climate Change; and General Science. The Commission tests understanding rather than recall, through statements to be judged correct or incorrect, pairs to be matched and assertion-reason items, and it likes the edges of a topic: a lesser-known provision of the Constitution, a river's tributary, a species' conservation status, the mandate of a statutory body. This page holds GK24's topic-wise GK notes for UPSC, written as short facts and tables, in English and Hindi, with each note linked to the current affairs and previous-year questions on the same topic. Start with Polity and Modern History, which carry the most questions, then Geography, the Economy, Environment, Ancient and Medieval culture and Science. Read a note, solve its PYQs, take its quiz, and come back to it in your monthly revision. A candidate who knows these notes and reads the daily current affairs has covered the syllabus the notice prescribes for Paper-I.
The Information Technology Act of India came into force in which year?
The Information Technology Act was passed by Parliament in 2000, received assent on 9 June 2000 and came into force on 17 October 2000; it is therefore cited as the Information Technology Act, 2000.
Read the full explanation →LIGO-India, the gravitational wave detector approved by the Union Cabinet in 2023, is being built in which state?
A gravitational wave detector is an L-shaped interferometer whose two arms, each four kilometres long, are watched for the minute change in length produced when a wave from colliding black holes or neutron stars passes through the Earth.
Read the full explanation →The Jantar Mantar observatories at Jaipur, Delhi, Ujjain, Mathura and Varanasi were built by
Their instruments, such as the giant sundial called the Samrat Yantra and the hemispherical Jai Prakash Yantra, measured time, declination and the positions of the planets with shadow and sightline alone, and the Jaipur site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2010.
Read the full explanation →Aditya-L1, India's first space-based solar observatory, was placed in
At that point the gravitational pulls of the Sun and the Earth combine with the orbital motion so that a spacecraft keeps station with the Earth, and from there the Sun can be watched continuously without any eclipse or occultation.
Read the full explanation →AstroSat, India's first dedicated multi-wavelength space observatory, was launched in which year?
AstroSat was launched on 28 September 2015 by PSLV-C30 from Sriharikota into a near equatorial low Earth orbit.
Read the full explanation →Observations from which Indian observatory contributed to the discovery of the rings of Uranus in 1977?
In 1977 astronomers watched Uranus pass in front of a distant star from the observatory in the Javadi hills, and the dips in the star's light before and after the planet itself crossed showed that rings surround Uranus.
Read the full explanation →Which of the following is a solar observatory, established in 1899, that holds more than a century of daily images of the Sun?
It is now part of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, and its digitised archive of daily photographs of the solar disc, sunspots and the chromosphere is among the longest continuous records of the Sun anywhere, which makes it valuable for the study of long solar cycles.
Read the full explanation →The two metre Himalayan Chandra Telescope of the Indian Astronomical Observatory stands at which site?
The Indian Astronomical Observatory sits there at about 4,500 metres in a cold desert, one of the highest and driest observing sites in the world, where very little water vapour and almost no artificial light make the sky exceptionally clear and dark.
Read the full explanation →The 3.6 metre Devasthal Optical Telescope, the largest optical telescope in India, is operated by which institute?
The telescope was built in collaboration with Belgium and activated in 2016 on the Devasthal ridge at about 2,450 metres, and the same site carries a 1.3 metre fast optical telescope and the four metre liquid mirror telescope.
Read the full explanation →The GMRT array consists of how many parabolic dishes, and of what diameter each?
Fourteen of them stand close together in a central square of about one kilometre, and the remaining sixteen are spread along three arms in a Y shape stretching some twenty-five kilometres, which gives the array both the sensitivity of a filled aperture and the resolution of a wide one.
Read the full explanation →The Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) is located near which city?
The array stands at Khodad, near Narayangaon, about eighty kilometres north of Pune, on flat land chosen for its low level of man-made radio interference, and it is operated by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.
Read the full explanation →Which of the following features of the Indian Constitution is NOT drawn from the United States?
The United States gives every person two citizenships, of the union and of the state of residence, while India deliberately gives one citizenship for the whole country, so that no state may treat the people of another state as outsiders.
Read the full explanation →The words socialist, secular and integrity were added to the Preamble of the Constitution by which amendment?
It changed the description of the country from a sovereign democratic republic to a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic, and changed the unity of the nation to the unity and integrity of the nation.
Read the full explanation →How long did the Constituent Assembly take to frame the Constitution of India?
In that period the assembly held eleven sessions and sat for one hundred and sixty-five days, and the draft was debated clause by clause.
Read the full explanation →A federation with a strong Centre, the vesting of residuary powers in the Centre and the appointment of Governors by the Centre were taken from
Canada is the federation that keeps residuary powers with the centre instead of leaving them with the units, appoints the head of each province from the centre and allows its supreme court an advisory jurisdiction, and all three features were adopted in India.
Read the full explanation →The provision for suspension of Fundamental Rights during an emergency is traced to the constitution of
The Weimar constitution allowed the President to suspend civil liberties in an emergency, and the Indian provisions under which the operation of certain Fundamental Rights may be restricted during a proclamation of emergency follow that model.
Read the full explanation →The Concurrent List, the freedom of trade, commerce and intercourse, and the joint sitting of the two Houses of Parliament were borrowed from
The Australian constitution has a list of subjects on which both the federal and the state legislatures may make law, and India adopted the device as the Concurrent List in the Seventh Schedule, with central law prevailing in case of conflict.
Read the full explanation →The procedure for amendment of the Constitution and the method of election of members of the Rajya Sabha were drawn from
Two features are traced to the South African constitution: the procedure for amending the Constitution, which combines a special majority with the consent of States for some provisions, and the election of members of the Rajya Sabha by the elected members of the State legislative assemblies through proportional representation by…
Read the full explanation →The Fundamental Duties in Part IV-A of the Constitution were inspired by the constitution of
India had no such chapter at first; ten Fundamental Duties were added in 1976 by the Forty-second Amendment on the recommendation of the Swaran Singh Committee, and an eleventh, the duty of a parent to provide education to a child, was added later.
Read the full explanation →The Directive Principles of State Policy in the Indian Constitution are borrowed from the constitution of
The Irish constitution of 1937 carried a chapter of directive principles of social policy, non-justiciable goals addressed to the legislature, and the Constituent Assembly adopted that device as Part IV of our Constitution, along with the nomination of members to the Rajya Sabha and the method of electing the President.
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