UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Sholas are small, dense, stunted evergreen forests that survive in the sheltered valleys and folds of the high hills of the Western Ghats above about 1,500 metres, and they alternate with rolling grassland to form the shola grassland mosaic, a habitat of the Nilgiri tahr.

It works under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, has its headquarters at Dehradun, maps the forest and tree cover of the country with satellite imagery and field checks, and brings out the India State of Forest Report once every two years.

The National Forest Policy of 1952 fixed the goal of keeping about one-third of the total land area of the country under forest, with a larger share in the hills and mountains, where slopes need tree cover to hold the soil, and a smaller share in the plains.

Harry Champion and S. K. Seth revised the earlier survey of Indian forest types in 1968 and grouped the forests into major groups such as moist tropical, dry tropical, montane subtropical, montane temperate, sub-alpine and alpine, each divided further into types, using the climatic controls of rainfall, humidity and temperature.

Mangroves grow in the salty, waterlogged mud of deltas and creeks, where the soil holds almost no oxygen, so the roots send up narrow pegs called pneumatophores above the mud surface to breathe, and many species also stand on arching stilt roots for support in the soft ground.

The sundari, whose botanical name is Heritiera fomes, is the dominant mangrove of the Ganga and Brahmaputra delta and gives the Sundarbans its name; its timber is hard and was long used for boats and posts.

These forests grow where annual rainfall exceeds 200 centimetres, on the windward western slopes of the Western Ghats, in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, in upper Assam and along the hills of the north-east.

Melocanna baccifera, the muli bamboo, covers large tracts of Mizoram and the neighbouring hills and flowers only once in about half a century, after which the whole stand dies.

Indian forests are classified administratively into reserved, protected and unclassed forests, and the first two together are described as the permanent forest estate, that is land maintained permanently for timber and other forest produce and for the protection of soil and water.

Tropical deciduous forest is called monsoon forest because it is the natural vegetation of the monsoon climate, growing where rainfall lies between 70 and 200 centimetres and where a marked dry season follows the rains.

Red sanders, or red sandalwood, is a tree of the dry deciduous forest and grows almost entirely in the Seshachalam and Palakonda hills of the Eastern Ghats in Andhra Pradesh, where it is prized for its dark red heartwood; it is not a thorn forest species.

The Kyoto Protocol set its target on a basket of six greenhouse gases, to be cut by an average of 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels.

The Chalukyas of Badami began as feudatories of the Kadambas of Banavasi and broke away as the Kadamba power declined.

Piklihal and Utnur are South Indian Neolithic settlements, famous for the ash mounds their cattle-keeping people left behind.

The second statement describes the two bodies correctly while the first gets the origin of the Board wrong, so only statement 2 can be accepted.

Dignaga and Nathamuni are matched rightly while Aryadeva is not, so exactly two pairs are correct.

The Act of 1813 broke the Company's trade monopoly and asserted the Crown's sovereignty, but left the revenues where they were, so the first two statements stand and the third does not.

The National Green Tribunal Act rests on the right to a healthy environment read into the right to life, so only the first provision is in point.

Indigo lost its market when chemists learned to make the dye in a factory, so the Indian crop became unprofitable and cultivation shrank.

Both statements describe the two offices wrongly, so neither can be accepted.