UPSC GK Questions 2026

Gopal Hari Deshmukh (1823–1892) of Maharashtra wrote under the pen name Lokahitawadi, meaning one who works for the good of the people, and the name stuck to him.

India follows a single standard time, Indian Standard Time, for the whole country, and it is ahead of GMT, not behind it.

During El Nino the trade winds of the Pacific weaken or even reverse, so a steady flow of these winds is not one of its results.

The munjaniq, also written manjaniq, was a siege engine that hurled heavy stones at fort walls, that is, a catapult.

Bhutan is the country that officially adopted Gross National Happiness, rather than economic output alone, as the measure of its progress.

The Amsterdam-St. Paul Plateau is a raised area of the ocean floor in the southern Indian Ocean, named after the French islands of Amsterdam and Saint-Paul that rise from it.

Gupta inscriptions show the kings using grand imperial titles and also religious epithets that linked them with the gods.

The magnetic force on a moving charge is F = q(v × B), and only an upward field turns a westward-moving positive charge towards the north.

Chemical weathering is the breakdown of rocks through reactions such as solution, oxidation, carbonation and hydration, and all of these need water.

The law of conservation of mass, stated by Antoine Lavoisier in 1789, says that in a chemical reaction mass is neither created nor destroyed.

When copper is left in moist air for a long time, it slowly reacts with oxygen, water vapour and carbon dioxide.

The South Atlantic Drift is part of the West Wind Drift, the cold eastward flow that circles Antarctica in the belt of the westerlies, around 40° to 50° south.

The Charter of the United Nations was drawn up at the United Nations Conference on International Organization held in San Francisco, USA, from April to June 1945, and was signed there on 26 June 1945.

On a hot day the air just above a road or desert sand is much hotter, and so optically rarer, than the air higher up.

At room temperature and normal pressure only two elements are liquids: mercury, a metal, and bromine, a non-metal. Mercury melts at about −39 °C and is used in thermometers and barometers because it stays liquid over a wide range and does not wet glass.

India adopted the parliamentary form of government from Britain, often called the Westminster model.

Potassium permanganate, KMnO₄, forms dark purple crystals that contain no water of crystallization; its formula has no attached water molecules.

This statement is wrong because bryophytes, the mosses and liverworts, have no true vascular tissue: they lack xylem to carry water and phloem to carry food.

As rivers come down from the mountains onto the plains, their slope suddenly drops and they can no longer carry their heaviest load.

The focus, or hypocentre, is the point inside the Earth where the rocks first break and energy is released. The point on the surface directly above it is the epicentre, which is usually where shaking is felt first and strongest, so statement 1 is correct.