UPSC GK Questions 2026

At the Lucknow session the Congress and the Muslim League agreed on a joint demand for self-government, and the Congress accepted separate electorates for Muslims; Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Muhammad Ali Jinnah were the chief architects, and the moderates and extremists of the Congress, divided since the Surat split of…

The Communal Award of August 1932 had given the Depressed Classes separate electorates.

Fought between 1790 and 1792 between Tipu Sultan and Lord Cornwallis, supported by the Nizam and the Marathas, it ended with the Treaty of Srirangapatnam, under which Tipu surrendered about half his territory and paid a heavy war indemnity, and two of his sons were taken as hostages.

Defeated by the Holkars at Poona, the Peshwa took shelter with the Company and signed the Treaty of Bassein in December 1802, accepting Wellesley's subsidiary alliance and a British force at his capital.

That war began after the Treaty of Surat of 1775, by which the Bombay government supported Raghunath Rao's claim to the Peshwa's seat, and it ended with the Treaty of Salbai in 1782 between Warren Hastings and Mahadji Scindia.

It was signed in 1765 by Robert Clive with the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II and Nawab Shuja-ud-Daula of Awadh after the Company's victory at Buxar in 1764.

Charles Fourier and Saint-Simon were French thinkers of the early nineteenth century who, with Robert Owen in Britain, argued that competition should be replaced by cooperative and planned communities in which property is held in common.

Consumer sovereignty means that the spending of consumers decides what is produced: a producer who makes what buyers do not want earns no profit and leaves the business, so in a market economy the consumer is said to rule.

It is called a command economy because a central planning authority, and not the market, commands how resources are used: it fixes the targets of output, allots raw materials to factories and often fixes prices and wages as well.

A severe balance of payments crisis, with foreign exchange reserves down to a few weeks of imports, forced the government to announce the New Economic Policy in July 1991.

It inserted the words socialist, secular and integrity into the Preamble, so the description of India became a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic.

The Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956 followed the Congress session at Avadi that called for a socialistic pattern of society, and it gave the public sector the commanding role.

Because resources are scarce and wants are unlimited, every economy must answer three questions, and these are called its central problems: what goods and in what quantity to produce, how to produce them, that is by which technique and combination of labour and capital, and for whom to produce, that…

Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867; it analysed capital, surplus value and the exploitation of labour and became the basic text of what is called scientific socialism.

In such an economy the state owns and runs the industries that need very large capital or serve strategic and social purposes, regulates the rest by law, and leaves ordinary production to private enterprise, while keeping responsibility for welfare and employment.

The Scottish economist published the Wealth of Nations in 1776 and is called the father of economics; he argued that if each person pursues his own interest in a free market, an invisible hand guides the outcome to the good of society, which became the classic defence of capitalism and…

In a capitalist or market economy the means of production are privately owned and nobody issues orders about production.

The crust is the outermost and thinnest layer of the earth and is of two kinds. The continental crust, made largely of lighter granitic rock rich in silica and aluminium, averages about thirty kilometres in thickness and reaches about seventy kilometres under young fold mountains such as the Himalaya.

Plate tectonics, propounded in 1967, holds that the lithosphere is broken into seven major plates and a number of minor ones that move over the plastic asthenosphere.

Near Easter Island in the South Pacific the rise spreads at more than fifteen centimetres a year, the highest rate measured, while the Arctic Ridge in option A has the slowest rate of less than two and a half centimetres a year.