UPSC GK Questions 2026

The two Iberian kingdoms were the pioneers of oceanic voyages, and after the first voyage of Columbus they agreed by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, with the Pope as arbiter, to divide the non Christian world along a line in the Atlantic: lands to the west of it for…

The expedition left Spain in 1519 under Magellan, who crossed the strait now named after him and named the Pacific Ocean for its calm waters.

The Portuguese captain Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa in 1488. He called it the Cape of Storms, and the king of Portugal renamed it the Cape of Good Hope because the way to India now lay open.

The Council of Trent, summoned by the Pope, sat in several sessions between 1545 and 1563, abolished the worst abuses such as the sale of indulgences, imposed discipline and training on the clergy and restated Catholic doctrine against the Protestants.

When the Pope refused to annul the marriage of Henry the Eighth to Catherine of Aragon, the English Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534, which declared the king the supreme head of the Church of England and cut the English church off from Rome.

Calvin set out his theology, including the doctrine of predestination, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 and built a reformed church order at Geneva that spread to Scotland, the Netherlands and France.

An indulgence was a pardon for sin sold for money, and the campaign to sell indulgences in Germany to pay for building work at Rome was the immediate provocation for Martin Luther, who nailed or posted his Ninety Five Theses at Wittenberg on 31 October 1517 arguing that no payment…

Gutenberg of Mainz in Germany built the first European printing press with movable metal type about the middle of the fifteenth century and printed the Bible that carries his name.

Machiavelli, a Florentine diplomat, wrote the Prince as advice to a ruler on how to win and keep power, judging actions by their results rather than by religious morality, and the word Machiavellian comes from this book.

Francesco Petrarch, an Italian poet and scholar of the fourteenth century, collected and studied classical Latin manuscripts and placed human life, reason and the individual at the centre of learning, which is why he is remembered as the father of humanism.

Constantinople, the capital of the eastern Roman or Byzantine empire, was captured by the Ottoman Turks under Sultan Mehmed the Second in 1453.

Rajasthan is divided into ten agro-climatic zones, which run from the arid western plain and the hyper arid partially irrigated zone in the west, through the irrigated north western plain and the two transitional plains of inland drainage and the Luni basin, to the semi arid and flood prone eastern…

The Lower Gangetic Plain, essentially West Bengal, has heavy rainfall, humid air and the alluvium of the delta, the conditions jute needs for growing and for retting, and it grows rice and potato along with it.

The fifteenth of the Planning Commission zones is a separate Islands region made up of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal and Lakshadweep in the Arabian Sea, with equatorial rainfall, thin coral or lateritic soils and coconut, areca nut, spices and fisheries as the mainstay.

Kharif crops are sown in June and July as the south west monsoon arrives and harvested in September and October, and they are the rain dependent crops: rice, jowar, bajra, maize, cotton, groundnut, soyabean and tur.

The National Forest Policy of 1952 laid down that one third of the total geographical area of the country should be under forest, and it fixed separate norms inside that target: about 60 per cent in the hills, where tree cover protects the slopes and the catchments, and about 20…

The ratio tells how many crops the sown land carries in an agricultural year, so a value of a hundred would mean a single crop everywhere and the Indian figure of about 140 per cent means that a large part of the land bears a second crop, mainly where irrigation…

Gross cropped area is a derived measure, not a land use head: it counts a field as many times as it is cropped in an agricultural year, so the same hectare can appear twice or thrice, and it is used with net sown area to calculate cropping intensity.

This head covers land that could be cultivated but has lain unused for more than five years, usually because it has become saline, waterlogged, eroded or short of water, and bringing it back into use is a standing aim of land reclamation programmes.

The Western Dry zone is western Rajasthan, the Thar region west of the Aravalli, with low and uncertain rainfall, sandy soil and a short growing season, so its crops are bajra, moth, guar and other hardy millets and pulses, with animal husbandry as the main support.