UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma flew in April 1984 aboard the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz T-11 as part of a joint programme between the Soviet Union and India, and spent about eight days aboard the Salyut 7 space station.

He began the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque at Delhi in 1192 after the second battle of Tarain, using the carved pillars and stones of temples that stood on the site, which is why its courtyard colonnade carries Indian bells, chains and foliage.

Tughlaq building is the most austere phase of the Sultanate style. It uses local grey sandstone or rubble, keeps ornament to a minimum and gives its walls a pronounced batter, that is a slope inward as they rise, which makes even a tomb look like a fort.

The Sidi Sayyid mosque in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, was built in 1573 in the last years of the Gujarat Sultanate.

Nur Jahan built it at Agra between 1622 and 1628 for her father Mirza Ghiyas Beg, who held the title Itmad-ud-Daulah.

Built between 1565 and 1572 by his widow Hamida Banu Begum and designed by the Persian architect Mirak Mirza Ghiyas, it is the first tomb in India set in the middle of a charbagh, a square garden cut into four quarters by walkways and water channels.

The Alai Darwaza was added in 1311 as the southern gateway to the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque in the Qutub complex at Delhi.

The Shalimar Bagh on the bank of the Dal lake in Srinagar was laid out by Jahangir in 1619 for his queen Nur Jahan.

The Buland Darwaza, the lofty gateway on the south side of the Jama Masjid at Fatehpur Sikri, was raised by Akbar in 1575 to mark his conquest of Gujarat.

The Qutub Minar in Mehrauli, Delhi, rises to about 72.5 metres, which is taken as 73 metres in answer keys.

The Jama Masjid of Delhi, whose formal name is Masjid-i-Jahan-Numa, was built by Shah Jahan between 1650 and 1656 as the congregational mosque of his new capital Shahjahanabad.

The Gol Gumbaz stands at Bijapur, now called Vijayapura, in Karnataka. It is the tomb of Muhammad Adil Shah of the Adil Shahi dynasty of Bijapur and was completed in the middle of the seventeenth century.

He received the award in 1967 in the category of journalism, literature and creative communication arts, for his films. His first film, Pather Panchali, had appeared in 1955, and he was later given the Bharat Ratna and an honorary Academy Award.

Her Hindi novel Ret Samadhi was translated into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, and it won the International Booker Prize in 2022.

She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel, The God of Small Things, set in Kerala, and no Indian woman had won it before her.

The Booker Prize is a British literary award given each year to one novel. Until 2014 only writers from the Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe were eligible; since then any novel originally written in English and published in the United Kingdom may be considered, and the winner receives fifty thousand pounds.

The prize was begun in 1969 with the firm Booker McConnell as its sponsor, which is where the name comes from, and it is given each year for a work of fiction written in English.

He is a physician and researcher of Indian origin, and his book The Emperor of All Maladies is a history of cancer written for general readers.

Joseph Pulitzer died in 1911 and provided for the prizes in his will; the first awards were made in 1917 by Columbia University.

Joseph Pulitzer, the newspaper publisher who owned the New York World, left money in his will both for a school of journalism and for the prizes, and Columbia University in New York administers the awards on the advice of the Pulitzer Prize Board.