UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

GATT was signed in 1947 by twenty three countries, India among them, and came into force on 1 January 1948 as a treaty with a small secretariat rather than a full organisation.

The WTO works from Geneva, where the GATT secretariat had been housed before it, and its head carries the title Director-General.

The IMF has its headquarters in Washington DC in the United States, and the World Bank Group stands across the street from it in the same city, which is why both are often described together as the Washington institutions.

In July 1944 delegates of forty four allied nations, including India, met at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in the United States and agreed to create the International Monetary Fund for monetary cooperation and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development for reconstruction lending, which is why the two are…

The World Trade Organization came into being on 1 January 1995 as the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and India, which had been a party to GATT since 1948, became a member of the WTO on that very first day, which makes it a founding member.

The census is taken under the Census Act of 1948 by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, which works under the Ministry of Home Affairs, and census is a Union subject so the responsibility is wholly that of the central government.

It is the only census year in which the population of India actually declined, the cause being the influenza epidemic of 1918 along with famine and outbreaks of plague and cholera.

The correct answer is B, Sikkim, whose population in Census 2011 was about 6.1 lakh, the smallest of any state; among the union territories the smallest was Lakshadweep with about 64,000 people.

The correct answer is A, Kerala, with a literacy rate of 93.91 per cent, the highest among the states, the result of a long history of schooling, missionary and princely state education and high female literacy.

The correct answer is C, Arunachal Pradesh, which recorded only 17 persons per square kilometre, the lowest among the states, because most of its area is steep mountain and dense forest with very little cultivable land.

The reason is the combination of fertile alluvial soil, assured water from the Ganga and its tributaries and a largely rural population living in closely spaced villages.

Census 2011 recorded an overall literacy rate of 74.04 per cent, made up of 82.14 per cent among males and 65.46 per cent among females, the gap of nearly seventeen percentage points being a favourite point for questions.

Census 2011 recorded an overall sex ratio of 943, an improvement over 933 in 2001, while the child sex ratio in the age group of nought to six years fell to 919 girls per 1,000 boys, the lowest recorded since independence.

Census 2011 counted 1,210.8 million people, that is about 121 crore, of whom roughly 62.37 crore were males and 58.65 crore females, giving India about 17.5 per cent of the world's population on about 2.4 per cent of its land area.

The census of 1881, taken during the viceroyalty of Lord Ripon, was the first in which the whole country was enumerated with reference to a single date, and from that year the census has been held every ten years without a break.

In Census 2011 Haryana recorded a sex ratio of 879 females per 1,000 males, the lowest among all the states of India, against the national figure of 943; among the union territories the lowest was Daman and Diu.

Parliament passed it under Article 327 to govern the conduct of elections: the qualifications and disqualifications of candidates, the nomination and the security deposit, corrupt practices such as bribery and undue influence, electoral offences, the filling of casual vacancies by by-election and the trial of election petitions by the High…

Article 324(5) says the Chief Election Commissioner shall not be removed from office except in like manner and on the like grounds as a judge of the Supreme Court, so it takes an order of the President after each House of Parliament has passed an address by a special majority…

The correct answer is A, Sukumar Sen, an officer of the Indian Civil Service who held office from 1950 to 1958 and conducted the first two general elections, of 1951-52 and 1957, for an electorate that was largely unlettered and had never voted before.

The first use of an electronic voting machine in an Indian election was in 1982 at North Paravur in Kerala, in a by-election where the machine was used in a limited number of polling stations.