UPSC GK Questions 2026

Kanada founded the Vaisheshika school, which classified the categories of existence and held that material things are made of paramanu, indivisible atoms that combine in pairs and larger groups to form the objects we see; the doctrine was reached by reasoning about divisibility rather than by experiment.

Mahaviracharya was a Jain mathematician of the ninth century associated with the Rashtrakuta court, and his Ganita Sara Sangraha is a systematic treatment of arithmetic operations, fractions, series and the areas and volumes of figures, and it was widely used in south India.

Varahamihira, who lived in the sixth century, summarised five earlier astronomical schools in the Panchasiddhantika, wrote the encyclopaedic Brihat Samhita covering astronomy, omens, architecture, gems and the finding of underground water, and composed the Brihat Jataka on horoscopy.

The Sulbasutras are appendices to the Shrauta Sutras and give the geometrical rules for laying out the brick altars of Vedic sacrifice, including the construction of squares and rectangles of a given area and the statement that the square on the diagonal equals the sum of the squares on the…

The Sushruta Samhita is the classical manual of shalya chikitsa or surgery, describing surgical instruments, the removal of the cataract, the setting of fractures, the stitching of wounds and the rebuilding of a severed nose, for which Sushruta is remembered as the father of surgery and of plastic surgery.

Bhaskara II, also called Bhaskaracharya, wrote the Siddhanta Shiromani in 1150 CE in four parts, of which Lilavati deals with arithmetic, mensuration and problems of everyday calculation, Bijaganita with algebra, and Grahaganita and Goladhyaya with astronomy.

Brahmagupta composed the Brahmasphutasiddhanta in 628 CE, in which he treated zero as a number and not merely as a placeholder and gave rules for adding, subtracting and multiplying positive and negative quantities, which he called fortunes and debts; he also wrote the Khandakhadyaka and argued that bodies fall because…

Aryabhata, born in 476 CE, wrote the Aryabhatiya in 499 CE in four sections: the Gitikapada on units of time and the large astronomical cycles, the Ganitapada on mathematics, the Kalakriyapada on the reckoning of time and planetary positions, and the Golapada on the celestial sphere.

SEBI was set up in 1988 as a non-statutory body and was given statutory status and powers by the Securities and Exchange Board of India Act, 1992, after which it became the regulator of the securities market, with its head office in Mumbai; appeals from its orders lie to the…

NASDAQ opened in 1971 in the United States as the world's first electronic stock market, with quotations carried on a computer network instead of a trading floor, and it now lists most of the large American technology companies; its benchmark is the NASDAQ Composite.

It was established in 1602 by the Dutch East India Company, whose shares were traded there continuously, and it is therefore counted as the world's first stock exchange; the exchange is now part of Euronext.

KOSPI stands for the Korea Composite Stock Price Index and is the benchmark of the Korea Exchange, which handles the securities market of South Korea.

The DAX is the benchmark index of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and tracks the largest German companies by market capitalisation and turnover.

The Hang Seng index records the leading shares of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and has been published since 1969; it is one of the most quoted Asian indices along with the Nikkei of Tokyo and the KOSPI of Seoul.

The FTSE 100 began in 1984 and records the share prices of the hundred largest companies by market capitalisation listed in London; the name comes from the Financial Times and the Stock Exchange, which set up the index jointly, and it is read as the Footsie.

The Nikkei 225 is the benchmark index of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and is named after Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the newspaper that has compiled it since the 1950s; it covers 225 leading Japanese companies.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average tracks 30 large American companies and is quoted for the New York Stock Exchange; it was created by Charles Dow in 1896 and is the oldest index of share prices still in use, the broader American benchmark being the S&P 500 and the technology-heavy one…

The Sensex was launched in 1986 and its series was worked back to the base year 1978-79, for which the index value is taken as 100, so that a Sensex reading shows how many times the market has grown since that base.

The SENSEX, short for Sensitive Index, is composed of 30 large, well established and actively traded companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, and since 2003 it has been calculated on the free-float market capitalisation method, which counts only the shares actually available for trading.

It was established in 1875 as the Native Share and Stock Brokers Association and functions from Dalal Street in Mumbai, which makes it the oldest stock exchange in Asia; it was also the first exchange in India to receive permanent recognition from the Government under the Securities Contracts (Regulation) Act…