UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The World Health Organization works from Geneva in Switzerland. Its constitution came into force on 7 April 1948, which is why that date is observed every year as World Health Day, and its governing body, the World Health Assembly, meets in Geneva each May.

The Index of Economic Freedom has been published by this research organisation based at Washington DC since 1995, and it scores countries on matters such as property rights, tax burden, government spending, trade freedom and business regulation.

It is the world authority on chemical nomenclature, so it approves the names and symbols of newly discovered elements, standardises the naming of compounds and maintains the recommended values of atomic weights.

The United Nations works in six official languages, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. Of the four names in the list, Arabic, Spanish and Chinese are all official, so only German, the second item, is not.

The conference held in 1944 at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in the United States set up two twin institutions, the International Monetary Fund to keep exchange rates orderly and help countries facing balance of payments difficulty, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development to lend for reconstruction and…

The Asian Development Bank was founded in 1966 to lend for development in Asia and the Pacific and has its headquarters at Manila, the capital of the Philippines.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization was founded in 1946 and works from Paris in France.

An Indian Air Force pilot, Rakesh Sharma flew to the Soviet space station Salyut 7 aboard a Soyuz spacecraft in April 1984 as part of a joint mission and spent about a week in orbit, carrying out experiments in biology and remote sensing.

Launched by NASA in 1977, Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter and Saturn, then continued outward and has since crossed into interstellar space, making it the farthest human-made object from the earth.

The Chinese mission Chang'e 4 landed on the far side of the Moon in January 2019, the first spacecraft ever to do so, and released the rover Yutu-2.

JAXA stands for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, formed in 2003 by merging three earlier Japanese space bodies, with its headquarters at Tokyo.

The European Space Agency was founded in 1975 by a group of European countries that decided to pool their space work, and its headquarters is in Paris.

Chandrayaan-3 was launched on 14 July 2023 on an LVM3 rocket, and its lander Vikram touched down near the lunar south pole on 23 August 2023, releasing the rover Pragyan.

The Mars Orbiter Mission was launched on 5 November 2013 by a PSLV rocket and was placed in orbit around Mars on 24 September 2014.

India's first satellite was named after the ancient astronomer and mathematician Aryabhata and was launched on 19 April 1975 from a Soviet site, since India did not yet have a launch vehicle of its own.

The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin circled the earth once aboard Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961 and became the first human being in space, a flight that lasted about one hour and forty eight minutes.

Sputnik 1 was launched on 4 October 1957 and became the first artificial satellite to circle the earth, sending out a simple radio signal that stations across the world could hear.

ISRO was formed on 15 August 1969, taking over the space work that had been carried on since 1962 by the Indian National Committee for Space Research.

NASA is the civilian space agency of the United States, established in 1958 after the launch of Sputnik, with its headquarters at Washington DC.

The Hill Forts of Rajasthan were inscribed in 2013 as a serial site of six forts: Chittorgarh, Kumbhalgarh, Ranthambore, Amber, Jaisalmer and Gagron.