UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

A pressure group is an organised body of people with a shared interest that tries to influence government policy without contesting elections or seeking power itself, so a trade union pressing for better wages is the classic example.

An ecotone is the transition zone where two different ecosystems meet and mix, such as the belt between a grassland and a forest, an estuary between a river and the sea, or a mangrove strip between land and ocean.

Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, chose his devoted follower Bhai Lehna as his successor and gave him the name Guru Angad, setting aside the claim of his own sons.

An inselberg is an isolated residual hill that rises abruptly from a plain in a hot desert, so it is the work of weathering and wind in arid regions, not of glaciers.

Under the Tinkathia system the indigo planters of Champaran forced every tenant to grow indigo on three kathas out of every twenty kathas of his holding.

Ghazi Malik was the title of Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq, who founded the Tughlaq dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate in 1320. He was governor of Dipalpur under the Khiljis and won the throne by defeating Khusrau Khan, the usurper who had ended Khilji rule.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development sets 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and these are broken into 169 targets.

Plate tectonics says the Earth's rigid outer shell is broken into plates that keep moving slowly, carried by convection currents in the mantle below.

The Joint Parliamentary Committee that examined the White Paper on Indian constitutional reform was chaired by Lord Linlithgow, and its report of 1934 became the draft of the Government of India Act of 1935.

Lincoln is the only American President shot inside a theatre, so he is the one the question points to.

The Purusha Sukta is the ninetieth hymn of the tenth mandala of the Rigveda.

The iron pillar that now stands in the Qutb complex at Mehrauli in Delhi carries a Sanskrit inscription in Brahmi script praising a king called Chandra, taken to be Chandragupta II of the Gupta dynasty, and it was raised in the fourth or early fifth century as a standard of…

India's annual rate of population growth reached its peak in the two decades from 1961 to 1981 and has fallen in every census decade since 1981, which is why demographers date the turn to that year.

The Second Anglo-Mysore War ran from 1780 to 1784. Haidar Ali fought the English East India Company with the Marathas and the Nizam on his side, and after his death in December 1782 his son Tipu Sultan carried the war on and signed the Treaty of Mangalore in March 1784.

An endemic species is one that occurs naturally in one particular area and nowhere else, and the Nicobar pigeon is the textbook Indian example, living in the forests of the Nicobar group of islands; the Andaman wild pig and the Narcondam hornbill are usually listed beside it.

SAARC was founded at Dhaka on 8 December 1985 by seven countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Around 850 AD Vijayalaya, until then a feudatory of the Pallavas, seized Thanjavur from the Muttaraiyar chiefs and made it his capital, and that conquest marks the beginning of the imperial Chola line.

The All Parties Conference set up a committee under Motilal Nehru in 1928, and the report it submitted that August, known as the Nehru Report, was a draft constitutional scheme for India.

The Special Gram Sabhas opened the People's Plan Campaign, and the plans the Panchayats will draw up under it are for the financial year 2027-28, which is the year after the campaign year itself.

This is the amount the Sixteenth Finance Commission has recommended for Rural Local Bodies for the award period 2026-31, and it marks an increase of nearly 84 per cent over what the Fifteenth Finance Commission provided, with the annual per capita grant rising from about Rs 400 to nearly Rs…