UPSC GK Questions 2026

The reason is that the state's rain comes mostly from the Bay of Bengal branch of the monsoon, which enters from the east and weakens as it travels inland, so the farthest north-western corner is driest.

There the old crystalline rocks, gneiss and granite, lie at the surface, and the iron released by their weathering gives the soil its red colour, turning yellow where the iron is hydrated by heavier rain.

The lava flows that spread over central and western India at the end of the Cretaceous left thick sheets of basalt, and when basalt weathers in a monsoon climate it yields a fine clay rich in iron, lime and magnesium, which is exactly the black soil of Malwa, the Narmada…

The Deccan trap basalt underlies a very large part of the state, from the Malwa plateau through the Narmada valley to Nimar and the Satpura, and its weathering has given black soil, also called regur or cotton soil, the largest share of the state's area.

The Tropic of Cancer crosses Madhya Pradesh almost through the middle, running past Ratlam, Ujjain, Bhopal, Vidisha, Sagar, Jabalpur and Shahdol, so the state is divided nearly in half by it and more districts of Madhya Pradesh are touched by the line than in any other state.

The Sixth Schedule, read with Article 244, lets the tribal areas of these four states run Autonomous District Councils with their own powers over land, forests, village administration, inheritance and customary law, such as the Bodoland Territorial Council in Assam and the Khasi Hills council in Meghalaya.

The Hornbill festival is held at Kisama near Kohima and opens on 1 December, the day Nagaland became a state in 1963; it brings the major Naga tribes together and is called the festival of festivals, and the hornbill of its name is the bird that appears in Naga headgear…

Majuli lies in the Brahmaputra in Assam, upstream of Jorhat, and is the largest river island; it is also the seat of the Vaishnavite satras founded in the tradition of Srimanta Sankardeva, and it was made a district of Assam, the first island district of the country.

Tripura juts into Bangladesh, which wraps around its north, west and south, so the state is joined to India only along its eastern side, where it meets Assam and Mizoram.

Article 371A was inserted when Nagaland was created and protects Naga customary law and practice, land and resources, so that an Act of Parliament on these matters applies to the state only if its Assembly so decides, and it gives the Governor a special responsibility for law and order.

Keibul Lamjao lies on the southern part of Loktak Lake near Imphal and floats on phumdis, the thick mats of soil and rotting plant matter that drift on the water.

Assam lies at the heart of the region and touches Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya and West Bengal, that is seven Indian states, besides the foreign neighbours Bhutan and Bangladesh.

The Council was set up by the North Eastern Council Act, 1971, started functioning in 1972 as the planning and advisory body for the region, and has had its secretariat at Shillong ever since; it works under the Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region.

The corridor runs through the northern districts of West Bengal around the town of Siliguri and is only about twenty kilometres wide at its narrowest, which is why it is nicknamed the Chicken's Neck.

Both had been Union Territories since 1972, Arunachal Pradesh after the North East Frontier Agency was renamed and Mizoram after the Mizo hills were separated from Assam, and both were raised to statehood on the same day in February 1987.

The Seven Sisters are Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura, the seven states that were carved out of the old Assam province and its Union Territories between 1963 and 1987.

The three dates of this one area are the whole question: the wildlife sanctuary was notified in 1978, the national park came in 1989 and the tiger reserve in 1990, so Option A and Option B are both true statements about Valmiki but answers to different questions, which is exactly…

The Chitwan national park of Nepal lies immediately across the border from Valmiki, so the two together form one continuous block of Terai forest and grassland; tigers, leopards and the occasional one-horned rhinoceros move between them, and the two countries manage the landscape as a shared corridor.

The house sparrow is the state bird, the peepal the state tree and the marigold the state flower, and exams often set all four in one question.

Both are small irrigation reservoirs in the hills of Jamui district in southern Bihar, built across seasonal streams, and over the years their shallow margins have become a winter home for thousands of waterbirds, including bar-headed geese; they were recognised as Ramsar sites in 2024 and were the state's second…