UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Exfoliation is caused by repeated heating and cooling of the outer layer of a rock and by the release of pressure when overlying material is removed; the surface expands and contracts more than the interior and splits away as curved sheets.

Water erosion passes through stages, and the soil lost grows at every stage. Splash erosion, numbered II, is the first and mildest: raindrops strike bare soil and knock single particles a few centimetres away.

Overgrazing strips the protective cover of grass, loosens the surface with hooves and leaves bare soil exposed to rain and wind, so it is one of the leading causes of soil erosion in dry India, never a remedy.

Bad lands are stretches of land cut into a close network of deep gullies and sharp ridges, so dissected that cultivation becomes impossible, and they are produced when running water removes the topsoil through sheet wash that concentrates first into rills and then into gullies.

Its full name is the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, and it recognises individual rights over land that such families were cultivating, community rights over grazing grounds and water bodies, and rights over minor forest produce, while making the gram sabha the authority…

The Forest Survey of India divides forest cover by the proportion of ground shaded by the tree canopy.

The Forest Survey of India, set up in 1981, has its headquarters at Dehradun in Uttarakhand, the city that is also home to the Forest Research Institute and the Indira Gandhi National Forest Academy, which makes Dehradun the centre of forestry work in the country.

In the early 1970s, in the Arabari range of the Midnapore district of West Bengal, foresters stopped treating villagers as encroachers and instead gave them a share in the protection and in the produce of a degraded sal forest; the forest recovered remarkably, and the experiment became the model for…

The National Forest Policy of 1952 laid down that about thirty-three per cent of the country's geographical area should carry forest or tree cover, and it broke that national figure into about sixty per cent for the hill and mountain regions, where slopes must be held against erosion and landslides…

The Appiko movement started in 1983 in the Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka, in the Western Ghats, where villagers walked into the forest and hugged trees marked for felling by contractors; Panduranga Hegde organised it after studying the Chipko movement of the Himalaya.

Van Mahotsav is observed in the first week of July, which is chosen because the monsoon has arrived over most of the country by then and a newly planted sapling has the best chance of surviving.

The movement began in 1973 in the Chamoli district of the Garhwal Himalaya, which was then part of Uttar Pradesh and has been in the new State of Uttarakhand since 2000.

Successive assessments by the Forest Survey of India have placed Madhya Pradesh first among the States in the absolute area under forest cover, a position it owes to its very large size and to the extensive teak and sal forests of the Satpura, Vindhya and Baghelkhand tracts.

The Bishnoi community of western Rajasthan follows the twenty-nine tenets laid down by Guru Jambheshwar in the fifteenth century, several of which forbid the felling of green trees and the killing of animals, and it is for this reason that khejri groves and herds of blackbuck survive in the desert…

The Forest (Conservation) Act was passed in 1980 to stop the steady loss of forest land to mining, roads, dams and townships.

The Act created the Lokpal, an anti-corruption ombudsman for the Union, consisting of a Chairperson and members of whom not more than half are judicial members, and it required the States to establish a Lokayukta.

The article, inserted by the 7th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1956, requires the President to appoint a Special Officer for Linguistic Minorities, usually called the Commissioner for Linguistic Minorities, to investigate all matters relating to the safeguards provided for linguistic minorities and to report to the President, who places the report…

The Central Information Commission was created by the Right to Information Act, 2005, and hears second appeals from the orders of public information officers and first appellate authorities of the Union.

It provides that the Chairman or any other member of a Public Service Commission shall be removed from office by order of the President on the ground of misbehaviour only after the Supreme Court, on a reference made by the President, has held an inquiry and reported that the member…

The article requires the President to appoint a person qualified to be a judge of the Supreme Court as Attorney General for India, the highest law officer of the Union, who advises the Government on legal matters and appears for it in the Supreme Court.