UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Dhrupad is austere and devotional, sung in four sections called sthayi, antara, sanchari and abhog, and it opens with a long unmetred alap.

Teentaal runs over sixteen matras divided into four equal vibhags of four beats each. The first beat of the cycle is the sam and carries the stress, the third vibhag opens on a khali, and the cycle returns to the sam at the end.

The melakarta ragas are the parent scales of Carnatic music, each of them using all seven notes in both ascent and descent.

Sarangadeva wrote the Sangeeta Ratnakara in the thirteenth century while attached to the Yadava court at Devagiri in the Deccan.

The Samaveda is the Veda of melody. Most of its verses are taken from the Rigveda, but they are arranged for singing rather than for recitation, and that singing is known as Samagana.

He was a Hindi poet long before he became Prime Minister, and Meri Ekyavan Kavitayen is his best-known collection. Kaidi Kavirai Ki Kundaliyan holds verses written during the Emergency, and Meri Sansadiya Yatra collects his speeches in Parliament.

Exam Warriors is written for school students facing examinations and sets out short chapters on preparation, sleep, play and dealing with pressure.

His autobiography, Matters of Discretion, covers a career that ran from the freedom movement through the ministries he held to his term as Prime Minister, and it is the book usually cited alongside the foreign policy approach that carries his name.

He had a long career in Gujarat and at the centre before becoming Prime Minister at the head of the first non-Congress government, and the book covers that whole span.

Nehru wrote the letters from prison in the early 1930s to explain the history of the world to a young reader, and they were later collected as Glimpses of World History.

These are the second and third volumes of his political memoir, the first being The Dramatic Decade: The Indira Gandhi Years.

His account of the office, published as My Presidential Years, is valued because his term fell in a period of short-lived governments, and it records how a President handles the choice of a Prime Minister when no party has a majority.

Besides these two titles he wrote Indian Philosophy in two volumes and The Philosophy of the Upanishads, and Teachers' Day is observed on his birthday, 5 September.

The first President of India published India Divided in 1946, examining the demand for partition and the arguments made on both sides in the years before independence.

The Insider is a novel that follows a politician's climb through state and national politics, and it is read as a lightly disguised account of the system its author knew from the inside.

Wings of Fire, written with Arun Tiwari, describes his boyhood in Rameswaram, his training as an engineer and his years in the space and missile programmes, and it is the most frequently asked title in this whole chapter.

He wrote it in 1944 while imprisoned in Ahmadnagar Fort, tracing Indian history and thought from the earliest times. Its Hindi version is Bharat Ki Khoj and the television series Bharat Ek Khoj was based on it.

The statutes of the Nobel Foundation allow a prize in one category to be divided among no more than three persons in a single year, and the money is shared between them.

The correct answer is B, the Karolinska Institute, the medical university in Stockholm whose assembly selects the laureate in Physiology or Medicine, exactly as Alfred Nobel's will laid down.

That makes her the youngest laureate in any category in the history of the prize.