UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The Indian civilian honours run in a fixed order of precedence: the Bharat Ratna first, then Padma Vibhushan, then Padma Bhushan and then Padma Shri. Counting from the top, Padma Bhushan is therefore the third highest, and it is given for distinguished service of a high order in any field.

Charvaka, also called Lokayata and attributed to Brihaspati, rejects the authority of the Vedas, denies rebirth and a soul surviving death and holds that perception alone is a valid means of knowledge, so it is classed as nastika or heterodox along with Buddhism and Jainism.

The fourth Buddhist council met in Kashmir under the patronage of the Kushana ruler Kanishka, and it is remembered because the assembly divided into the Hinayana and Mahayana schools; the proceedings were in Sanskrit, and Vasumitra presided with Ashvaghosha associated with it.

Shankaracharya expounded Advaita or non dualism, in which Brahman alone is real, the world of appearance is maya and the individual soul is not different from Brahman; he wrote commentaries on the Brahma Sutra, the principal Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, and is credited with establishing monastic centres in the…

Mahavira was the twenty fourth and last of the Tirthankaras, born at Kundagrama near Vaishali, who renounced the world at thirty, attained kaivalya after twelve years of austerity and attained nirvana at Pavapuri in Bihar.

The Ahmadiyya movement was founded in 1889 at Qadian in the Punjab by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, and it is one of the religious movements of modern India that grew out of the reformist debates of the nineteenth century, drawing on both Islamic tradition and the liberal ideas of the age.

Kanada, also called Uluka, composed the Vaisheshika Sutra and taught that the material world is built of indivisible atoms called paramanu, which combine to form the objects of experience; the school also classifies reality into categories or padarthas and is treated as the companion of Nyaya in logic and physics.

Nyaya is the school of logic and holds that liberation follows from correct reasoning, so it pairs with logical thinking.

The eightfold path or ashtangika marga is the fourth of the noble truths preached by the Buddha in his first sermon at Sarnath, and it names the middle way between indulgence and mortification: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration.

Purva Mimamsa is the school founded by Jaimini, which treats the karma kanda or ritual portion of the Vedas as authoritative and holds that liberation follows from the correct performance of Vedic duty.

Ramanuja taught Vishishtadvaita or qualified non dualism, in which souls and matter are real but exist as attributes of Brahman.

A reef building coral polyp lives in a close partnership with single celled algae called zooxanthellae that live inside its own tissue.

In the tundra only a thin upper layer of the ground thaws in the brief summer; below it the soil stays frozen through the year, and this permanently frozen subsoil is called permafrost.

Succession is a directional process: each community changes the place a little, making it fit for the next, until a community arrives that is in balance with the climate of the region and can replace itself generation after generation without being replaced by another.

Primary succession starts on a surface that has never held life, a cooled lava flow, a bare rock or a fresh sand dune, and the slowest part of the whole process there is the making of soil: rock has to be weathered grain by grain and organic matter has to…

A bare rock offers no soil, almost no water and no shelter, and only an organism that can survive long spells of drying and can hold on to bare stone can settle there.

The temperate grassland is the same biome the world over, short nutritious grass with almost no tree, but each continent gives it a local name, and the pairs are asked directly in examinations.

The taiga forms an almost unbroken belt of needle leaved softwood trees, mainly pine, spruce, fir and larch, right across the northern parts of Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia, and this belt covers a greater area of land than any other biome.

The savanna is a tropical grassland with tall coarse grass and scattered flat topped trees, and its wet season produces an enormous crop of grass.

Kyushu is one of the four main islands of the Japanese archipelago and is of volcanic origin, built by the eruptions of an island arc where one plate dives beneath another; Mount Aso on it has one of the largest volcanic calderas in the world.