UPSC GK Questions 2026

Germanium is a metalloid, an element whose properties lie between those of metals and non-metals. It is a hard, shiny, grey-white solid like a metal, yet it is brittle and conducts electricity far less well than a metal, which makes it a semiconductor.

Aurei (singular aureus) were the gold coins of the Roman Empire, and large numbers of them reached India in payment for Indian goods.

This statement is wrong because every photon, whatever its energy, travels in vacuum at the same speed of light, about 3 × 10^8 metres per second.

A demographic dividend is the boost to economic growth that a country can get when the share of people of working age, roughly 15 to 64 years, rises above the share of dependants, children and the elderly.

Temporary hardness is caused by the bicarbonates of magnesium and calcium, Mg(HCO3)2 and Ca(HCO3)2. It is called temporary because simple boiling removes it: on heating, the soluble bicarbonates break down into insoluble carbonate or hydroxide, carbon dioxide and water, and the solid settles out.

The gap between an object and its real image is smallest when the object is placed at 2F, twice the focal length from the lens.

The remark comes from Abbé Jean-Antoine Dubois, a French Catholic missionary who lived in south India, mostly in Mysore, from 1792 to 1823.

The allegorical picture of Jahangir embracing Shah Abbas of Persia, painted around 1618 and now in the Freer Gallery in Washington, is the work of Abul Hasan.

Faizi, Akbar's poet laureate and the elder brother of Abul Fazl, translated the Lilavati into Persian in 1587. The Lilavati is the arithmetic part of the Siddhanta Shiromani, written by the mathematician Bhaskaracharya (Bhaskara II) in the twelfth century, and it covers numbers, fractions, progressions and measurement.

These are four of the twelve soil orders in the USDA Soil Taxonomy, the classification also used by Indian soil scientists.

Article 78 sets out the duties of the Prime Minister towards the President, chief among them keeping the President informed.

It is a later Mahayana Buddhist text of ritual and prophecy, not a work of Ashvaghosha. Ashvaghosha was a Buddhist poet, dramatist and philosopher of the first–second century CE, linked by tradition to the court of the Kushana king Kanishka.

Primary deficit is fiscal deficit minus interest payments, so it shows the borrowing a government needs for its current needs alone.

All three statements are correct. The Special Marriage Act, 1954 lets any two Indians marry by civil registration whatever their religion, without either partner having to convert, so it is the law that covers inter-religious marriages.

Article 1 of the Draft Constitution described India as a 'Union of States', and the same words survive in Article 1 of the Constitution today.

Rutherford's gold foil experiment showed that an atom has a tiny, dense, positively charged centre, which he called the nucleus.

By weight, calcium is the smallest of the four and oxygen the largest, so the ascending order is calcium, aluminium, silicon, oxygen.

Jaugada is in Odisha, not Karnataka, so only pairs 2 and 3 are right. Jaugada, in Ganjam district of Odisha, is one of the two places, with Dhauli, that carry Ashoka's Separate Kalinga Edicts.

A rod standing upright on one end falls over at the slightest push, because its centre of gravity is high and its base is tiny.

Article 243E gives every panchayat a term of five years from the date of its first meeting, allows it to be dissolved earlier under a law in force, and requires the election to be completed within six months of the dissolution; but a panchayat constituted at such an election continues…