UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Patta means cloth and chitra means picture, so Pattachitra is literally painting on cloth, made on a canvas of layers of cloth pasted together with tamarind seed paste and chalk and rubbed smooth with a stone.

The Warli painter builds everything from three shapes: the circle for the sun and the moon, the triangle for the mountain and the pointed tree, and the square for the sacred enclosure.

Madhubani painting, also called Mithila painting, belongs to the Mithila region of north Bihar around Madhubani, Darbhanga and Sitamarhi, and is also practised in the Terai of Nepal.

A Geiger-Muller counter contains a gas-filled tube in which an entering ray ionises the gas and sets off a pulse of current, so each pulse counts one particle; a film badge worn by a worker records the total dose instead.

Iodine-131 has a half-life of roughly eight days, which is why the danger from it after an accident is intense but short-lived, and why potassium iodide tablets are distributed at once so that the thyroid gland is saturated with ordinary iodine and absorbs less of the radioactive form.

Reactor number four of the Chernobyl plant, in Ukraine in the then Soviet Union, exploded on 26 April 1986 and scattered radioactive iodine, caesium and strontium over a wide area of Europe.

The becquerel, symbol Bq, is the SI unit of activity and equals one disintegration per second.

Strontium lies just below calcium in the same group of the periodic table and behaves chemically like it, so strontium-90 taken in through milk, water or food is deposited in bone and in teeth in place of calcium.

A cooling tower releases the heat of used cooling water to the atmosphere by evaporation or by air flow, so that the water leaving the plant is close to the temperature of the receiving river or lake.

Thermal and nuclear power stations draw large volumes of water to condense steam and return it several degrees warmer, which makes them the single largest source of waste heat in rivers, lakes and coastal waters.

The solubility of a gas in water decreases as the temperature of the water rises, so hot water discharged from a power station holds less dissolved oxygen.

The Rules define a silence zone as the area up to 100 metres around a hospital, an educational institution or a court, and such an area has to be declared by the competent authority.

The Rules of 2000 lay down 55 decibel as the day-time limit and 45 decibel as the night-time limit for a residential area.

The Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules were notified in the year 2000 and they were framed under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986.

The decibel, written dB, is the unit in which the intensity level of sound is expressed, and it is named after Alexander Graham Bell.

Geetanjali Shree's novel Ret Samadhi, translated into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, won the International Booker Prize in 2022, becoming the first book originally written in Hindi, and in any Indian language, to receive that award.

The Turing Award has been given by that body since 1966, is named after the British mathematician Alan Turing, and is widely described as the Nobel Prize of computing; Raj Reddy, of Indian origin, received it in 1994 for work in artificial intelligence.

The Gandhi Peace Prize was instituted by the Government of India in 1995, the one hundred and twenty-fifth birth anniversary year of Mahatma Gandhi, and although foreign nationals and institutions may receive it, it is an Indian national award given by the Government of India.

The Right Livelihood Award was instituted in 1980 in Sweden to honour work on the practical problems the Nobel Prizes were seen to overlook, and it is presented in Stockholm; the Chipko Movement received it in 1987 and Ela Bhatt of the Self Employed Women's Association in 1984.

The World Food Prize was created in 1986 at the initiative of Norman Borlaug to honour work that improves the quality, quantity or availability of food, and the Indian agricultural scientist M. S. Swaminathan, a leader of the Green Revolution in India, received the very first prize in 1987.