UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj, also published in English as Indian Home Rule, in 1909 while sailing from London to South Africa, and he cast it as a dialogue between a reader and an editor; in it he rejects industrial civilisation and modern machinery, and argues that true self-rule means rule…

Jean-Jacques Rousseau published The Social Contract in 1762 with the opening claim that man is born free yet everywhere is in chains, and he held that legitimate authority rests only on the general will of the whole people, an idea that fed directly into the French Revolution and into the…

The Florentine writer Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513 and it was published in 1532; it advises a ruler to judge an action by whether it preserves the state rather than by whether it is virtuous, and for this it is called the first work of modern political realism and…

Written during the Great Depression and published in 1936, this book argued that an economy can settle at a level of high unemployment on its own, and that the remedy is to raise effective demand through government spending; it created macroeconomics as we know it and the whole school called…

Karl Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867 as his full critique of the capitalist mode of production, built around surplus value and the exploitation of labour; the later volumes were edited and brought out by Friedrich Engels after Marx died.

Dadabhai Naoroji, honoured as the Grand Old Man of India and the first Indian to be elected to the British House of Commons, brought together his writings in this book and showed with figures that a large part of India's wealth was being carried away to Britain every year through…

Kautilya, also known as Chanakya and as Vishnugupta, was the minister and guide of Chandragupta Maurya, and his Arthashastra is a manual of statecraft that deals with the duties of a king, the organisation of the treasury, taxation, trade, spying, law and war; it is the earliest Indian work usually…

The Scottish thinker Adam Smith published this book in 1776, and it is treated as the starting point of economics as a separate subject, which is why he is called the father of economics; its most quoted idea is the invisible hand, by which the self-interest of individuals is said…

The prize is meant to encourage scientists in the productive middle of their careers, so it is given for notable research carried out in India by a scientist who has not crossed forty-five years of age, and it covers seven disciplines from biological sciences to physical sciences.

The Abel Prize was created by the government of Norway and first awarded in 2003, and it is presented every year by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in memory of Niels Henrik Abel, the Norwegian mathematician who died young; unlike the Fields Medal it carries no age limit…

Instituted in 2005 by SASTRA University at Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu, the prize is given every year to a mathematician aged thirty-two or below for work in areas influenced by Srinivasa Ramanujan, and the age limit was set at thirty-two because that was the age at which Ramanujan died.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, born at Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu and later a citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 for showing how the ribosome, the machinery inside a cell that reads the genetic message and builds proteins, is put together.

The Royal Society has awarded the Copley Medal since 1731 for outstanding achievement in any branch of science, which makes it older than the Nobel Prizes by well over a century and a half; it is given every year and is open to researchers of any nationality, so it covers…

Alfred Nobel signed his will in 1895 and died in 1896, and after his estate was settled the first prizes were given in 1901 in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace; they are presented every year on 10 December, the anniversary of his death.

C. V. Raman announced his discovery of the scattering effect now named after him on 28 February 1928, and since 1987 India has observed that date as National Science Day, with a theme, lectures and science fairs in schools and laboratories.

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him, and he was the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in any of the sciences; he made the discovery on…

The Kalinga Prize was created at UNESCO in 1951 from a gift made by Biju Patnaik of Odisha, later the Chief Minister of that state, and it was first awarded in 1952; it honours a writer, editor, broadcaster or film maker who has helped explain science to ordinary people, and…

The Association for Computing Machinery has given the Turing Award every year since 1966 for lasting contributions of a technical nature to computing, and it is named after Alan Turing, the British mathematician who framed the idea of a universal computing machine and worked on breaking wartime codes.

Because Alfred Nobel's will created no prize for mathematics, the Fields Medal has come to be treated as the highest honour in the subject; it was first awarded in 1936, is named after the Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields, and is presented at the International Congress of Mathematicians once every…

The prize was instituted in 1958 by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in memory of Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, the chemist who served as its first Director-General and built the chain of national laboratories; it is given to Indian scientists below the age of forty-five in seven branches of…