UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

An IPO is the first sale of shares by a company to the general public, after which the shares are listed and traded on a stock exchange; it belongs to the primary market, because the money raised goes to the company itself.

A person aggrieved by an order of SEBI may appeal to the Tribunal, which is provided for by the SEBI Act itself, and from the Tribunal a further appeal lies to the Supreme Court on a question of law.

The money market deals in short-term funds of up to one year, through treasury bills, commercial paper, certificates of deposit and call money, and the Reserve Bank regulates it as part of its control over credit and liquidity.

The Sensex was compiled backwards to 1978-79 and that year was given a base value of 100, so the index number states how many times the market value of its thirty constituents has grown since then.

The Sensex, or Sensitive Index, of the Bombay Stock Exchange is built from thirty large, well established and actively traded companies drawn from the main sectors of the economy, and it is weighted by free-float market capitalisation.

It was founded in 1875 as the Native Share and Stock Brokers’ Association, grew out of brokers meeting under a banyan tree in Bombay, and is the oldest stock exchange in Asia; it now stands on Dalal Street and its benchmark index is the Sensex.

SEBI first appeared in April 1988 as an administrative arrangement with no legal powers, and it became a statutory regulator when the Securities and Exchange Board of India Act was passed in 1992; the words quoted in the question are taken from the preamble of that Act, which speaks of…

Sambhar lies west of Jaipur in a shallow depression with no outlet to the sea; water that flows in can only evaporate, leaving behind the salt that has made the lake a major source of common salt for centuries.

Bhakra is built across the Sutlej at the Bhakra gorge on the border of Himachal Pradesh and Punjab, is the highest straight gravity dam in India, and the lake it holds is named Gobind Sagar after Guru Gobind Singh.

Loktak in Manipur is covered with phumdis, floating mats of soil and decaying vegetation thick enough to walk on, and the southern part of the lake was declared Keibul Lamjao National Park, the only floating national park in the world and the last natural home of the sangai or brow-antlered…

The Tehri dam stands in the Tehri Garhwal district of Uttarakhand, just below the point where the Bhilangana joins the Bhagirathi, and it is the tallest dam in India; it supplies power, drinking water and irrigation, and its construction submerged the old town of Tehri.

Chilika lies along the coast of Odisha, separated from the Bay of Bengal by a long sand bar, and its mixture of fresh and sea water supports one of the largest wintering grounds for migratory birds in the subcontinent as well as a population of Irrawaddy dolphins.

It lies in the Kashmir valley, is fed by the Jhelum, and is the largest freshwater lake in India; it acts as a natural flood absorber for the valley and is a designated wetland of international importance.

Formed by the Varahi river in the Shivamogga district of Karnataka, it is counted as the highest waterfall in India, falling in a long series of steps through rocky terrain; because it lies within the catchment of the Mani dam, its full flow is seen mainly in the monsoon.

Jog Falls is formed by the Sharavathi river where it drops off the edge of the Western Ghats in the Shivamogga district of Karnataka, and it falls in four separate streams traditionally named Raja, Rani, Rocket and Roarer.

The Kaleshwaram project lifts water from the Godavari near the confluence of the Godavari and the Pranahita and carries it through a chain of barrages, pump houses, tunnels and canals to the drier districts of Telangana; it is described as a multi-stage lift irrigation scheme rather than a single storage…

The Maithon dam is built across the Barakar, a tributary of the Damodar, in Jharkhand, and is one of the reservoirs of the Damodar Valley Corporation, so it has nothing to do with the Kaveri.

It is the centrepiece of the Pancheshwar Multipurpose Project, planned on the Mahakali river, which forms part of the boundary between India and Nepal, and it is to be built and operated jointly by the two countries under the Mahakali Treaty for power, irrigation and flood control.

Graphite is an allotrope of carbon in which each atom is bonded to three others, leaving one electron per atom free to move through the layers, so it conducts electricity although it is a non-metal; this is why graphite is used for electrodes and in dry cells.

An amphoteric oxide reacts with both acids and bases to form salts, and aluminium oxide does exactly that, behaving as a base towards hydrochloric acid and as an acid towards sodium hydroxide; zinc oxide is the other amphoteric oxide asked in examinations.