UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Article 164 of the Constitution says the Governor appoints the Chief Minister, and the other ministers are appointed by the Governor on the advice of the Chief Minister.

Mathura on the Yamuna became the second capital of the Kushanas, while Purushapura, today's Peshawar, was the main one.

Kalbaisakhi is the name given in West Bengal to the violent evening thunderstorms of the hot weather season, from March to May.

Ashoka created a new class of officers called Dhamma Mahamattas, mentioned in his fifth Rock Edict, in about the thirteenth year of his reign.

Zoji La, or the Zojila pass, lies in the Zanskar range of the Himalayas at a height of about 3,528 metres.

Article 21 says no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.

Dabu is a mud resist hand block printing craft of Rajasthan, practised mainly at Akola in Chittorgarh and at Bagru and Sanganer near Jaipur.

India's first vulture breeding centre, the Jatayu Conservation Breeding Centre, was set up at Pinjore in the Panchkula district of Haryana in 2001.

Part XIV of the Constitution, titled Services under the Union and the States, covers Articles 308 to 323, and the public service commissions sit in it.

Mehrgarh was a Neolithic farming village, not a city of the Harappan civilisation. It lies on the Kachi plain of Balochistan and goes back to about 7000 BCE, thousands of years before the mature Harappan phase of 2600 to 1900 BCE.

The full name of the satellite, Ariane Passenger Payload Experiment, contains the answer, since it flew as a passenger on an Ariane launch in 1981 to test the building of a geostationary communication satellite in India.

GAGAN stands for GPS Aided GEO Augmented Navigation and was developed by ISRO together with the Airports Authority so that civil aircraft in Indian airspace get position information accurate and reliable enough for approach and landing.

BeiDou is the Chinese global navigation satellite system, built in phases and now offering worldwide coverage, and the name is the Chinese term for the constellation of the Big Dipper.

The correct answer is B, IRS-1A, launched in 1988, which began the Indian Remote Sensing series and was the first such satellite whose data was used routinely for crop assessment, forest mapping, water resources and land use rather than only for experiment.

A Lagrange point is a place where the gravitational pulls of the two bodies and the orbital motion balance, so a spacecraft can stay there with very little fuel, and from L1 the sun can be watched continuously without eclipse or occultation.

Astrosat was launched on 28 September 2015 by a PSLV and carries instruments that observe the same cosmic source in the ultraviolet, the visible and the X-ray bands at the same time, which is what multi-wavelength means and what makes the mission unusual among space telescopes of its size.

Launched in 2002 as METSAT, it was the first Indian satellite built only for weather work, and it was renamed Kalpana-1 in memory of Kalpana Chawla, the India-born astronaut who died in the Columbia accident of 2003.

The system was designed as a constellation of seven satellites, three of them in geostationary orbit and four in geosynchronous orbits inclined to the equatorial plane, a small number being enough because the service area is regional and not global.

The name was given in 2016 to the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System, IRNSS, when the seventh satellite of the constellation was placed in orbit, and the word navik also carries the sense of a sailor or navigator, which is why it was chosen.

It was launched on 19 April 1975 by a Soviet launch vehicle, since India had no vehicle of its own at the time, and it carried experiments in X-ray astronomy, solar physics and the ionosphere.