UPSC GK Questions 2026

Mills set up on the bank of the Ganga from the middle of the nineteenth century made Kanpur the first great industrial city of northern India, first in cotton textiles and army supplies and then in leather and tanning, and the nickname followed from the comparison with the mill town…

The fertile plain of western Uttar Pradesh, watered by canals and tube wells, carries the densest sugarcane tract in the country, and the state leads India both in cane grown and in sugar produced, with mills concentrated in Meerut, Muzaffarnagar, Saharanpur and Bijnor.

The Congress Socialist Party was formed in 1934 as a group within the Indian National Congress to push it towards socialism, and Jayaprakash Narayan became its first general secretary.

A lawyer of Madras who turned to the labour cause, Chettiar organised the first May Day meetings in India on 1 May 1923 and founded the Labour Kisan Party of Hindustan; a red flag was used on the occasion.

Both measures were aimed at the growing labour and communist movement, the first to deport foreign agitators and the second to curb strikes in public utility services, and the two young men threw bombs and leaflets to make, in their words, the deaf hear.

Spratt had been sent to India by the Communist Party of Great Britain and worked with the Workers and Peasants Parties; he was arrested in March 1929 and tried at Meerut along with Benjamin Francis Bradley and Lester Hutchinson, the three Englishmen in the dock.

Sweeping arrests were made in March 1929, soon after the great strikes of 1928, and the trial at Meerut went on until 1933, making it one of the longest political trials of the colonial period.

Manabendra Nath Roy, who had gone abroad in search of arms during the First World War and had helped found the Communist Party of Mexico, formed a small emigre Communist Party of India at Tashkent on 17 October 1920 with a handful of muhajirs and revolutionaries.

It allowed unions to register, gave a registered union the standing of a body that could hold property and sue, and protected its office bearers from certain civil suits and from the charge of criminal conspiracy for lawful union work.

In 1918 Gandhi led the Ahmedabad mill workers in their demand for a wage rise and undertook his first fast as a weapon in an industrial dispute; out of that struggle grew the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association in 1920, which stood for arbitration between workers and owners rather than class…

The All India Trade Union Congress was founded at Bombay on 31 October 1920 and Lala Lajpat Rai, the Punjab Congress leader, took the chair as its first president, linking the labour cause to the national movement.

Bahman Pestonji Wadia, a theosophist associated with Annie Besant, organised the workers of the Buckingham and Carnatic Mills at Madras in 1918 into the Madras Labour Union, the first body in India with members, subscriptions and office bearers, and therefore the first trade union in the modern sense.

A follower of Jyotiba Phule and the editor of the Marathi paper Dinbandhu, Lokhande organised the Bombay mill workers in 1884 and placed their demands for shorter hours and a weekly holiday before the Factory Commission, which is why the body is called the first labour association in India.

Ansari. Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari was a physician and a Congress leader who presided over the Madras session of the Congress in 1927; he had nothing to do with the communist prosecutions and was never an accused in the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case.

Above the tree line in the western and central Himalaya the mean temperature of even the warmest month stays below ten degrees Celsius, which is the defining condition of the E group, and the tundra and ice-cap variants of that group occupy the high valleys and the snowfields.

C. W. Thornthwaite measured precipitation effectiveness and thermal efficiency, that is, the balance between the water a place receives and the water it loses to evaporation and transpiration, and because these are derived quantities rather than raw readings his scheme is called rational.

Koppen was born in Russia and worked in Germany, and his training in plant science is the reason his classification uses natural vegetation as the index of climate and sets its boundaries where vegetation belts change.

Koppen set the boundary of the tropical group at a mean temperature of 18 degrees Celsius in the coldest month, the value below which many tropical plants cannot thrive, and the whole of peninsular India as well as both coasts clears it.

Within the dry B group Koppen used two capital letters for the degree of dryness, S for the steppe, which is semi-arid, and W for the desert, which is fully arid, so BShw describes a hot semi-arid climate with a dry winter.

The interior of the Deccan is hot in every month, which gives it the capital A, and it has a long dry season with moderate rain in summer, which gives it the small letter w, the classic savannah combination.