UPSC GK Questions 2026

Satyendranath Tagore, an elder brother of Rabindranath Tagore, succeeded in the London examination and joined the Indian Civil Service in 1864, nine years after the first competitive examination was held, and served in the Bombay Presidency.

This Act took away the Company's right to nominate its civil servants and threw recruitment open to competition, after which the committee headed by Lord Macaulay in 1854 settled the syllabus and the first competitive examination was held in London in 1855.

Cornwallis, Governor General from 1786 to 1793, is called the father of the civil services in India because he fixed adequate salaries for the Company's servants, forbade them from carrying on private trade or taking presents, and made promotion depend on seniority instead of patronage, which together turned a trading…

Evaporation is the escape of molecules from a liquid surface into the air, and it slows as the air above fills with vapour; when the humidity falls the air can hold more vapour, so the rate of evaporation rises.

High clouds such as cirrus are thin and made of ice crystals; they let most of the sunlight pass through but absorb the outgoing infrared radiation from the surface, so their net effect is to warm.

In convection the heated matter itself moves and carries its energy with it: air near a warm surface expands, becomes lighter, rises as a current and is replaced by cooler air sinking in its place, and the same happens in a pan of boiling water.

An isotherm joins places of equal temperature, and on a world map the isotherms run roughly east to west, parallel to the latitudes, bending sharply where a continent meets an ocean because land and water heat at different rates.

Insolation measured at the top of the atmosphere is greatest over the equator, but what reaches the ground depends on cloud as well as on the angle of the rays, and the subtropical deserts lie under the descending limb of the Hadley circulation, where the sky is clear for most…

An inversion needs the ground to lose heat quickly and the air above to stay undisturbed: a long night gives time for terrestrial radiation to escape, a clear sky lets it escape, dry air absorbs little of it, and calm conditions keep the cold air lying in place, so the…

Advection is the sideways or horizontal transfer of heat by moving air, and in the middle latitudes most of the day to day variation in temperature comes from it; the hot loo that blows over north India in summer and the cold wave that follows a north-westerly wind in winter…

The orbit of the earth is an ellipse, so the distance from the sun changes through the year; the earth is closest at perihelion about the third of January and farthest at aphelion about the fourth of July, which is option D and the usual distractor in this question.

This is the normal lapse rate, the average fall of temperature with height in the troposphere, and it is the reason a hill station is cool while the plain at the same latitude is hot.

Of every hundred units of insolation arriving at the top of the atmosphere, about thirty-five are turned back before they can heat the ground, twenty-seven from the tops of clouds, two from snow and ice covered surfaces and the remainder scattered by the atmosphere; this reflected share is the albedo…

The word is a contraction of incoming solar radiation, and it means the short-wave energy from the sun that reaches the earth, measured in India by the India Meteorological Department in units of energy per unit area per unit time.

. The Act of 1919 did not make the Central Executive responsible to the Legislature; the Governor-General and his Executive Council stayed answerable only to the British Parliament.

. Under MPLADS an MP only recommends works; the district authority sanctions, executes and completes them.

The Moderates never demanded universal adult franchise; they asked only for a larger share for educated Indians in the legislative councils.

Annie Besant founded the Central Hindu College (with its school) at Benaras in 1898, and it later became the nucleus of Banaras Hindu University.

Statements 1 and 3 are correct; statement 2 is wrong because the woman surrounded by lotuses and elephants is a different figure, usually identified as Gajalakshmi or Maya.

The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 brought together the Factories Act, 1948, the Plantations Labour Act, 1951 and other laws on safety and working conditions.