UPSC GK Questions 2026

Bharatiya Reserve Bank Note Mudran Private Limited was set up in 1995 as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Reserve Bank and runs the two banknote presses at Mysuru in Karnataka and Salboni in West Bengal.

The mint of an Indian coin can be read from the small mark placed below the year of minting, and a five-pointed star stands for the Hyderabad mint.

An amendment of the Reserve Bank of India Act in 1956 replaced the proportional reserve system with the Minimum Reserve System, under which the Bank must hold assets worth two hundred crore rupees against the note issue, of which gold must be not less than one hundred fifteen crore rupees…

Section 24 of the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934 permits banknotes of denominations up to ten thousand rupees, so a note of a higher value would need an amendment of the Act by Parliament.

The one rupee note is issued by the Government of India under the Coinage Act and carries the signature of the Finance Secretary, while every other denomination is a banknote issued by the Reserve Bank under Section 22 of its Act and carries the signature of the Governor.

Section 22 of the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934 confers on the Reserve Bank the sole right to issue banknotes in India, and the Issue Department of the Bank keeps this function separate from its banking business.

Bolivia lost its coast on the Pacific to Chile in the War of the Pacific in the nineteenth century and now reaches the sea only through the ports of its neighbours, while Paraguay lies in the interior and depends on the Parana and Paraguay rivers for an outlet, which is…

The Great Artesian Basin lies below the dry interior of eastern Australia, mainly under Queensland and parts of New South Wales, South Australia and the Northern Territory, and it is the largest artesian basin in the world; water enters the porous rock where it is exposed near the Great Dividing…

The Panama Canal was opened in 1914 across the narrow isthmus of Panama, it is about eighty kilometres long and uses a system of locks and the artificial Gatun Lake, and it saves a ship sailing between New York and San Francisco the long voyage around Cape Horn at the…

The Pampas spread over the plains of Argentina and extend into Uruguay, and they are the home of wheat and alfalfa farming, of large cattle ranches called estancias and of the herdsmen known as gauchos; the grassland owes its growth to moderate rainfall and the cool season of the mid…

The Murray rises in the Snowy Mountains of the Great Dividing Range and, with its long tributary the Darling, drains the south-eastern interior of Australia; the basin is the country's chief farming region for wheat, fruit and sheep, and it is supported by the Snowy Mountains water scheme and by…

The Great Barrier Reef stretches for over two thousand kilometres in the Coral Sea along the north-eastern coast of Queensland, is the largest coral reef system in the world, and was placed on the list of World Heritage sites in 1981; the warm shallow tropical water of the continental shelf…

Death Valley lies in eastern California within the Mojave desert region and its floor at Badwater Basin is about eighty-six metres below sea level, the lowest land point of North America; it is also one of the hottest places recorded on the earth.

The Atacama lies in northern Chile between the Andes and the Pacific coast, and it is the driest desert in the world because the cold Peru or Humboldt current chills the air along the coast and the Andes block moisture from the Amazon side; the desert is also known for…

Lake Titicaca lies on the Altiplano plateau of the Andes at a height of about three thousand eight hundred metres and is shared by Peru and Bolivia; it is the highest lake in the world on which steamers ply, which is the exact reason it is called the highest navigable…

The Angel Falls drops about nine hundred seventy-nine metres from the Auyan Tepui table mountain in the Guiana Highlands of Venezuela and is the highest uninterrupted waterfall in the world; the local name is Kerepakupai Vena.

Aconcagua rises to about six thousand nine hundred sixty metres in the Andes in the province of Mendoza in Argentina, close to the border with Chile, and it is the highest peak of both South America and the southern hemisphere, as well as the highest mountain outside Asia.

Denali, which was earlier called Mount McKinley, stands in Alaska in the United States and is the highest peak of North America at about six thousand one hundred ninety metres; the name means the high one in the local Athabaskan language and was officially restored in 2015.

A small piece of tissue called an explant is placed in a sterile nutrient medium with growth regulators, it forms an unorganised mass called a callus and then whole plantlets, because a plant cell is totipotent, that is, able to give rise to a complete plant; the plants so raised…

The system comes from a defence mechanism of bacteria against viruses: a guide RNA takes the Cas9 protein to a chosen sequence in the DNA, Cas9 cuts both strands there, and the cell's own repair machinery then changes the sequence, so a gene can be switched off or corrected in…