UPSC GK Questions 2026

Temperature falls with height through the mesosphere and reaches the coldest values in the whole atmosphere, about minus 90 to minus 100 degrees Celsius, at its top.

The Deccan Traps, the vast lava plateau of the north-western peninsula, were laid down by eruptions at the close of the Cretaceous, about 66 million years ago.

A spit is a ridge of sand or shingle joined to the land at one end, with the other end running out into open water.

Nagarjuna, the Mahayana philosopher of about the second century CE, founded the Madhyamika school and wrote its root text, the Mulamadhyamakakarika.

Lithification, metamorphism and solidification are each a step in the rock cycle, the endless change of rocks from one type into another.

Excavators found a ploughed field below the Harappan town at Kalibangan, in Hanumangarh district of Rajasthan, on the dry bed of the Ghaggar.

Akshay Kumar won the Best Actor award at the 64th National Film Awards, announced in April 2017, for playing a naval officer in Rustom.

Gwadar is a deep-sea port on the Arabian Sea coast of Pakistan's Balochistan province. Gwadar lies on the Makran coast, not far from the border with Iran and close to the mouth of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

Natural change counts only births and deaths, so it is the birth rate minus the death rate. Both rates are usually given per thousand people per year.

Bharavi, a Sanskrit poet of the sixth century CE, wrote the Kiratarjuniyam. The Kiratarjuniyam is a mahakavya in eighteen cantos.

The Dutt-Bradley thesis was a communist document which held that the Indian National Congress could play a great and foremost part in building an anti-imperialist people's front.

Pollen first reaches the stigma, then the gametes fuse, the zygote divides to form an embryo, and the embryo inside the seed grows into a seedling.

Mirza Ghulam Ahmad founded the Ahmadiyya Movement in 1889 at Qadian, a town in the Gurdaspur district of Punjab. The Ahmadiyya Movement was one of the Muslim reform movements of the late nineteenth century.

PMGSY is a centrally sponsored rural development scheme, launched as part of the poverty reduction strategy, to give all-weather road connectivity to unconnected villages.

Light travels at different speeds in different media, and this change in speed at the boundary makes it bend. Light is fastest in vacuum, about 3 × 10⁸ m/s, and slower in water and glass.

Green plants use sunlight, carbon dioxide and water to make glucose, giving out oxygen as a by-product. Photosynthesis takes place mainly in the chloroplasts of leaf cells, where chlorophyll traps light energy.

Both work in neutral to alkaline conditions, in the mouth and the small intestine, and stop working in the acid of the stomach.

Assam is called the land of the red river and blue hills, the red river being the silt-laden Brahmaputra and the blue hills those that ring its valley.

The Indian Independence Act ended British rule but did not lay down the framework of the Constitution; that framework came largely from the Government of India Act, 1935.

Filament bulbs are commonly filled with argon, often mixed with nitrogen, not helium. An inert gas in a filament bulb slows the evaporation of the hot tungsten filament.