UPSC GK Questions 2026

Under colonial rule laissez-faire meant that the state left the economy open to British goods and capital; it did nothing to promote Indian capitalism and in practice left Indian enterprise unprotected.

Light that enters a cut diamond is reflected again and again inside it before it escapes, which makes the stone sparkle.

The exact, absolute position of any point on Earth is fixed only where its line of latitude crosses its line of longitude.

It joins north-eastern North America with Western Europe, two of the most industrialised regions on Earth, and carries the heaviest traffic of any ocean route.

Restructuring military commands for the best use of resources, including joint and theatre commands, is a task of the Department of Military Affairs, not of the Department of Defence.

Kodumanal is an excavated Sangam-age settlement in Erode district, on the northern bank of the Noyyal river, a tributary of the Kaveri.

These four dynasties ruled the Vijayanagara empire one after another. Harihara I and Bukka I of the Sangama dynasty founded Vijayanagara in 1336 on the banks of the Tungabhadra.

Sound is a mechanical wave that needs a medium to travel, while the other three are electromagnetic waves. Sound travels as a longitudinal wave of compressions and rarefactions in air, water or solids, which is why it cannot pass through a vacuum.

A Wing Commander of the Indian Air Force holds the same rank as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army and a Commander in the Navy.

A crater is the bowl-shaped depression at the top of a volcano, around the opening through which lava, gas and ash come out.

A drumlin is a smooth, oval hill shaped by a moving glacier out of glacial till, so it is a landform of glacial deposition.

Uranus cannot normally be picked out by the naked eye and was discovered only in 1781, so ancient Indian astronomers never wrote about it.

The 1835 resolution did the opposite: it stopped fresh stipends to students of Oriental institutions and stopped spending on printing Oriental texts.

Electromagnetic waves are transverse, not longitudinal, so this statement is false. In an electromagnetic wave the electric field and the magnetic field oscillate at right angles to each other and both at right angles to the direction in which the wave travels.

Operation Sadbhavna is the Indian Army's goodwill and civic action programme for people in remote and disturbed areas. The Army began it in the late 1990s in Jammu and Kashmir and later took it to Ladakh and parts of the North-East.

A pull factor is something attractive at the destination that draws people towards it, and better pay is the classic example.

Tropical rainforests hold more plant and animal species than any other land ecosystem. These forests cover only about six to seven per cent of the Earth's land, yet they are thought to hold more than half of all known land species.

Podsolization is the soil process of cool, moist climates under coniferous forest, which lie in the high middle latitudes. In the cold, wet taiga belt, needle litter from pines and firs decays slowly and forms acidic humus.

All three statements are correct: the WTO replaced GATT, the IAEA inspects nuclear sites worldwide, and Amnesty International is a non-governmental organisation.

The Build-a-thon opened in early July with more than 25 registered teams, each with about four members, and in the preparation phase experts from the International Telecommunication Union and the Department of Telecommunications held five online mentoring sessions.