UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Santali is an Austro-Asiatic language of the Munda group, spoken mainly in Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha, and Pandit Raghunath Murmu designed the Ol Chiki script for it so that it need not borrow a script from a neighbouring language.

Prinsep, an officer of the East India Company mint at Calcutta, deciphered the Brahmi script in 1837, which made the edicts of Ashoka readable and opened up the early history of India.

It states that the official language of the Union shall be Hindi in the Devanagari script and that the form of numerals to be used shall be the international form of Indian numerals; it also allowed English to continue for fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution, a period…

When the Constitution came into force in 1950 the Eighth Schedule listed 14 languages.

That amendment added four languages, Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali, to the Eighth Schedule and took the count from 18 to 22, where it stands.

Under Article 345 a State may adopt any language in use within it as its official language, and Uttar Pradesh has adopted Hindi as its official language and Urdu as its second official language.

The tribal languages of Jharkhand and the neighbouring belt of central and eastern India, namely Santali, Mundari, Ho and Kurukh's neighbours in the Munda group, belong to the Austro-Asiatic family, whose Indian branch is called Munda.

Kannada is one of the four major Dravidian languages, the others being Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam, and it is the official language of Karnataka.

There is no language family by that name in India. The Afro-Asiatic family, which the name echoes, covers Arabic, Hebrew and the Berber and Cushitic languages of West Asia and North Africa, and no Indian language belongs to it.

The Templeton Prize was instituted in 1972 by the investor John Templeton to honour work that explores the deepest questions of life and of the spirit, and Mother Teresa received the first award in 1973, six years before her Nobel Peace Prize.

It is named after Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who was the first High Commissioner for Refugees under the League of Nations and who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922.

It is named after Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear physicist who became a campaigner for civil liberties and himself won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.

Ramon Magsaysay was President of the Philippines and died in an air crash in 1957; the award was created in the same year in his memory, it is presented at Manila, and it honours greatness of spirit in service to the people of Asia.

The Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust instituted this prize in 1986, two years after Indira Gandhi's death, and it is presented on 19 November, her birth anniversary, with a cash award of twenty-five lakh rupees.

The correct answer is B, Julius Nyerere, the first President of Tanzania, who received the Gandhi Peace Prize in its first year, 1995, for his work for peace and for the poor of Africa.

The Government of India instituted the Gandhi Peace Prize in 1995, the year of the 125th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, and it is administered by the Ministry of Culture.

The prize for 2014 was shared by Kailash Satyarthi of India, who founded the Bachpan Bachao Andolan against child labour, and Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, who campaigned for girls' education and who remains the youngest person to receive any Nobel Prize.

Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her work among the destitute and the dying in Kolkata through the Missionaries of Charity, which she had founded in 1950.

The correct answer is B, the International Committee of the Red Cross, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1917 and 1944 for its work in the two World Wars and again in 1963, the centenary year of its founding.

The Swiss humanitarian Henry Dunant, whose account of the battlefield at Solferino led to the founding of the Red Cross and to the first Geneva Convention, shared the first Nobel Peace Prize of 1901 with the French campaigner Frederic Passy.