UPSC GK Questions 2026

Bakhira, in Sant Kabir Nagar district of eastern Uttar Pradesh, is the largest natural lake of the state. It is protected as a bird sanctuary for the migratory birds that winter there and is also listed as a Ramsar wetland of international importance.

The Yamuna rises at the Yamunotri glacier in Uttarakhand, flows past Delhi, Mathura and Agra and joins the Ganga at Prayagraj after a course of more than thirteen hundred kilometres, which makes it the longest tributary of the Ganga.

The Upper Ganga Canal, designed by Proby Cautley and opened in 1854, leaves the Ganga at Haridwar and waters the upper Ganga-Yamuna Doab through Meerut, Bulandshahr and Aligarh.

The Rihand dam in Sonbhadra district of Uttar Pradesh holds back the Rihand river, a tributary of the Sone, and its reservoir, named Govind Ballabh Pant Sagar after the state's first chief minister, is the largest man-made lake in India by surface area.

Pachnada, in Etawah district, takes its name from the meeting of five streams, where the Chambal joins the Yamuna along with the Sindh, the Kwari and the Pahuj.

The Betwa rises on the Vindhyan plateau in Madhya Pradesh, flows north-east across Bundelkhand past Jhansi and Orchha and joins the Yamuna at Hamirpur.

The Ramganga rises in the Kumaon Himalaya, enters the plain through Bijnor and Moradabad, waters Bareilly and the Rohilkhand districts and joins the Ganga near Kannauj.

The Gomti rises from Fulhar lake, also called Gomat Taal, in Pilibhit district of the terai belt, flows south-east through Lakhimpur Kheri, Sitapur, Lucknow, Sultanpur and Jaunpur, and joins the Ganga east of Varanasi.

The Yamuna, the longest tributary of the Ganga, joins it at Prayagraj, and the meeting place is called the Sangam.

After leaving the hills at Haridwar in Uttarakhand, the Ganga enters Uttar Pradesh in Bijnor district and then flows south-east past Kannauj, Kanpur, Prayagraj, Varanasi and Ghazipur before passing into Bihar near Ballia.

Bt cotton carries genes from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, which make the plant produce a protein toxic to bollworm larvae.

The Genome India Project was launched in January 2020 by the Department of Biotechnology, which works under the Ministry of Science and Technology, and brings together about twenty academic institutions to sequence Indian genomes and build a reference set that reflects the country's genetic diversity.

The Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics was established in 1995 as an autonomous institution of the Department of Biotechnology and works at Hyderabad on DNA fingerprinting services, diagnostics of genetic disorders and research in genomics.

In the Watson and Crick model the two strands are held together by hydrogen bonds between complementary bases: adenine pairs with thymine through two hydrogen bonds and guanine pairs with cytosine through three.

The polymerase chain reaction, invented by Kary Mullis in 1983, repeats three steps: the DNA is denatured near ninety-five degrees Celsius, short primers anneal at a lower temperature, and the strand is extended at about seventy-two degrees.

The Human Genome Project was launched in 1990 as an international public effort coordinated in the United States by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, with laboratories in several countries taking part.

Each nucleotide of DNA carries a phosphate group, and the phosphate backbone gives the whole molecule a net negative charge at the pH used in the laboratory.

Cas9 is an enzyme that breaks the sugar-phosphate backbone of both DNA strands at the point where its guide RNA has bound, provided a short adjacent signal called the PAM is present.

The two scientists showed that the bacterial CRISPR-Cas9 system could be directed by a designed guide RNA to cut any chosen sequence of DNA, which turned a microbial defence mechanism into a general tool for editing genomes, and they shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020.

Working at the University of Leicester in 1984, Alec Jeffreys found that certain short sequences, the minisatellites or variable number tandem repeats, repeat a different number of times in different people, and that a pattern made from them identifies an individual.