UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

A shelter belt is a row or a block of trees and shrubs planted across the direction of the prevailing wind.

Sultan Mehmed the Second captured Constantinople in 1453, ending the Byzantine or Eastern Roman empire, and the city became the Ottoman capital under the name Istanbul.

Apollo 11 landed on the Moon on 20 July 1969, and Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on its surface, followed by Buzz Aldrin, while Michael Collins stayed in the command module in orbit.

The Berlin Wall, built in 1961 to stop movement from East Berlin to West Berlin, was opened and then demolished by crowds on both sides from 9 November 1989, and its fall is the symbol of the collapse of communist rule in eastern Europe.

The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth once aboard Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961, becoming the first human being in space; the day is observed as the International Day of Human Space Flight.

The United Nations Charter came into force on 24 October 1945 once it had been ratified by the five permanent members of the Security Council and a majority of the other signatories, and that date is observed every year as United Nations Day.

A Paris crowd attacked and captured the Bastille, a royal fortress and prison that stood for the arbitrary power of the Bourbon monarchy, on 14 July 1789, and that day is taken as the start of the French Revolution; France keeps it as its national day, known as Bastille Day.

The Great Depression began with the crash of the New York stock market in October 1929, remembered through Black Thursday and Black Tuesday of that month.

Little Boy was the code name of the uranium fission bomb dropped by the United States on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, the first use of a nuclear weapon in war.

The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles and formally ended the First World War between Germany and the Allied powers.

Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in November 1799 in the coup that overthrew the Directory, and he became First Consul of France, which is the point at which the French Revolution is usually said to have ended; he crowned himself emperor five years later, in 1804.

Napoleon Bonaparte was finally defeated on 18 June 1815 at Waterloo in present-day Belgium by the allied armies led by the Duke of Wellington and the Prussian commander Blucher.

The Eiffel Tower was completed in Paris in 1889, a hundred years after the storming of the Bastille in 1789, and it served as the entrance arch of the World's Fair held that year to mark the centenary of the French Revolution.

India After Gandhi, published in 2007, is Ramachandra Guha's history of the Indian republic from independence onwards, covering partition, the integration of the princely states, the making of the Constitution, the wars, the Emergency and the economic changes that followed.

The Natyashastra, attributed to the sage Bharata, is the foundational text of Indian performing arts, covering the stage, acting, gesture, costume, music and above all the theory of rasa, the aesthetic flavours a performance should produce; every classical dance form traces its grammar to it.

Banabhatta was the court poet of Harshavardhana of Kanauj in the seventh century, and his Harshacharita is a biography in ornate Sanskrit prose that is a major source for the reign, alongside the account left by the Chinese traveller Hiuen Tsang.

Arthur Llewellyn Basham, a British historian of ancient India, published The Wonder That Was India in 1954 as a survey of Indian civilisation before the coming of the Muslims, and it remains one of the most widely read introductions to the subject; a companion second volume covering the medieval period…

Kautilya, also known as Chanakya and Vishnugupta, is credited with the Arthashastra, a manual in fifteen books covering administration, taxation, law, espionage, diplomacy and war, and traditionally linked with the rise of Chandragupta Maurya.

Kalhana composed the Rajatarangini, the river of kings, in Sanskrit verse in the twelfth century. It traces the rulers of Kashmir in sequence, weighs inscriptions, coins and earlier chronicles as evidence, and is therefore usually described as the first work of Indian historical writing in the modern sense.

The Mimamsa Sutra, also called the Purva Mimamsa Sutra, was composed by the sage Jaimini and is the founding text of the Mimamsa school, one of the six orthodox schools of Indian philosophy; it is concerned with the correct interpretation of the ritual portions of the Vedas and with the…