UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

He was an officer of the East India Company mint and secretary of the Asiatic Society, and in 1837 he worked out the values of the Brahmi letters, which made the edicts of the king who called himself Devanampiya Piyadassi legible for the first time.

Its name comes from saman, a melody, and it arranges hymns, most of them taken from the Rigveda, in the form in which the priest was to sing them at a sacrifice, so the earliest Indian system of musical notes is traced to it.

In his Principles of Economics he defined consumer surplus as the difference between what a buyer is willing to pay for a good and what he actually pays, and he also gave the standard measure of elasticity of demand, which is why his name attaches to both ideas.

A duopoly is the limiting case of oligopoly in which only two firms supply the whole market, so each one frames its price and output with a direct eye on the other.

A monopoly is a market with one seller whose product has no close substitute, so the firm is the industry and is a price maker: it chooses the price and lets the market decide the quantity, or the reverse.

The market clears where the demand and supply curves cut each other, that is where the quantity buyers wish to buy is exactly the quantity sellers wish to sell; the price there is the equilibrium price and the quantity the equilibrium quantity.

A higher price covers the rising cost of producing extra units and promises a larger profit, so sellers offer more, and the supply curve therefore rises from left to right.

Elasticity is the percentage change in quantity divided by the percentage change in price; if the numerator is zero the whole value is zero, and the demand curve becomes a vertical straight line.

When only the price of the good itself changes, the buyer simply moves to another point on the same demand curve, and a move to a larger quantity at a lower price is called an extension of demand, while the reverse is a contraction.

The law of demand records an inverse relationship: at a higher price buyers take less of a good and at a lower price they take more, which is why the demand curve slopes downward from left to right.

Robert Giffen observed that when the price of a cheap staple such as coarse bread fell, poor families did not buy more of it but less, because the saving let them shift to a better food; such inferior goods are therefore called Giffen goods and their demand curve slopes upward.

This form, analysed by Edward Chamberlin, keeps two features of perfect competition, a large number of firms and free entry and exit, but drops the third: each firm sells a differentiated or branded product, so it faces a downward sloping demand curve and has a little control over its own…

An oligopoly is a market in which a few large firms supply the whole output, so each must watch how the others will react to its price, and the cigarette industry is the standard example because a handful of companies hold almost the entire market.

Perfect competition assumes a homogeneous product, very many buyers and sellers, perfect knowledge and free entry and exit, and the visible result of all this is a single ruling price: the same good cannot sell at two prices at the same moment, because any buyer would move to the cheaper…

Selvas is the name given to the equatorial rainforest of the Amazon basin, a multi storeyed evergreen forest of hardwoods such as mahogany, ebony and rosewood, with so many species mixed together that commercial logging of a single kind is difficult.

Hot deserts lie on the western margins of continents roughly between 20 and 30 degrees north and south, under the descending dry air of the subtropical high pressure belt.

The taiga is the belt of coniferous softwood forest between about 50 and 70 degrees latitude, and in the southern hemisphere that belt is almost entirely ocean: only the narrow tail of South America and a few islands reach it, which is far too little land for a continuous forest…

The Velds are the temperate grasslands of the high plateau of South Africa, where maize and cattle farming and the gold mining of the Witwatersrand go together.

The Llanos are the grasslands of the Orinoco basin in Venezuela and Colombia and the Campos those of the Brazilian highlands, and both lie in the savanna belt, where a hot wet season alternates with a sharply dry one and the grass grows tall and coarse with scattered thorny trees.

It lies on the western margins of continents between about 30 and 45 degrees latitude, and the wind belts shift with the sun: in winter the rain bearing westerlies move towards the equator and reach it, while in summer the dry descending air of the subtropical high sits over it.