UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Morris gave equal weight to three indicators only, life expectancy at age one, the infant mortality rate and basic literacy, and the striking feature of his index is that income appears nowhere in it; he argued that income is a means and that the results of development should be measured…

The index was introduced in the 2010 Human Development Report and is produced jointly with that initiative at the University of Oxford, whose Alkire-Foster method identifies households deprived at the same time in several of ten indicators grouped under health, education and standard of living.

The Human Development Report groups countries in four bands: very high at an HDI of 0.800 and above, high from 0.700 to 0.799, medium from 0.550 to 0.699 and low below 0.550.

Until 2010 the health, education and income indices were averaged arithmetically, which allowed a country to offset a very poor score in one dimension with high scores in the other two.

The switch was made in the 2010 Human Development Report. Gross national income was preferred to gross domestic product because it includes incomes earned abroad and sent home and excludes incomes earned in the country by foreigners, so it is closer to what residents can actually spend; and purchasing power…

It is the composite measure that puts health, education and income together in a single figure between 0 and 1, built as the geometric mean of one index for each of the three dimensions, and published by the UNDP since 1990.

The Human Development Index is built from exactly three dimensions and nothing more: a long and healthy life, knowledge, and a decent standard of living.

The Pakistani economist led the team that produced the first Human Development Report for the UNDP in 1990 and designed the index, drawing on the capability approach of Amartya Sen, who advised the work.

The UNDP brought out the first Human Development Report in 1990, with the Human Development Index as its centrepiece, and it has published the report and the index since.

The fossil of Archaeopteryx carries feathers and wings like a bird together with teeth in the jaws, claws on the wings and a long tail with bones, all reptilian features, so it stands as the standard example of a connecting link in the fossil record.

The same arrangement of bones, humerus, radius and ulna, carpals, metacarpals and phalanges, is used for walking in a man, for swimming in a whale, for flight in a bat and for running in a cheetah, which indicates descent from a common ancestor and is called divergent evolution.

He held that an organ used often becomes stronger and one left unused withers, and that characters so acquired in a lifetime are passed to the offspring, the giraffe's lengthening neck being his best known illustration.

Darwin set out in that book the theory of evolution by natural selection, drawing on observations made during his voyage on HMS Beagle, among them the finches of the Galapagos islands whose beaks differ with their diet.

A person with Down syndrome carries three copies of chromosome 21 instead of two, a condition called trisomy 21, so the total chromosome number is 47 rather than 46.

A human body cell has 46 chromosomes arranged in 23 pairs, of which 22 pairs are autosomes, the chromosomes that are alike in both sexes, and the remaining pair is of sex chromosomes, XX in a female and XY in a male.

RNA carries adenine, guanine, cytosine and uracil, and the uracil occupies the place that thymine holds in DNA, pairing with adenine in the same way.

James Watson and Francis Crick published the double helix model in 1953, with two strands running in opposite directions and bases paired on the inside, using the X-ray diffraction photographs produced by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins; Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in 1962.

The correct answer is B, Wilhelm Johannsen, the Danish botanist who gave the words gene, genotype and phenotype, distinguishing the hereditary constitution of an organism from its visible expression.

In a dihybrid cross two pairs of characters are followed together, for example seed shape and seed colour, and the appearance of all four combinations in the proportion nine to three to three to one shows that the inheritance of one pair does not depend on the inheritance of the…

When two heterozygous plants of the first generation are crossed, three quarters of the offspring show the dominant character and one quarter the recessive one, because the recessive appears only when both factors in the pair are recessive.