UPSC GK Questions 2026

The correct answer is A, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who came as Director-General in 1944 and insisted that a mound be dug layer by layer, each layer recorded in section with its pottery, so that the order of occupation could be read from the earth itself; he applied the method at…

Appointed by Lord Curzon in 1902 and Director-General until 1928, he put Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the hands of Daya Ram Sahni and R. D. Banerji, saw that the seals and bricks from the two places belonged to one unknown civilisation and announced it in 1924, afterwards publishing the great…

Travelling by train through Raisen district in Madhya Pradesh in 1957, he noticed the rock formations rising above the forest, returned to examine them and found hundreds of shelters whose walls carry paintings of hunters, dancers and animals running from the Upper Palaeolithic to historical times; Bhimbetka was added to…

Lothal lies in Ahmedabad district of Gujarat on the Bhogava, and the baked brick basin found there, connected to the river by a channel, is generally identified as a dockyard, which makes Lothal the port town of the Harappan world; it also yielded a bead factory, a warehouse and the…

The correct answer is B, Daya Ram Sahni, who was appointed in 1931, having already made his name by excavating Harappa ten years earlier.

The amendment of 2010 declared the belt of a hundred metres around every centrally protected monument or site a prohibited area, in which construction and mining are barred except for repairs to the monument itself, and the next two hundred metres a regulated area, where building needs the permission of…

It lets the central government declare a monument or an archaeological site to be of national importance, controls excavation and punishes damage, and its amendment of 2010 fixed the hundred metres around such a monument as a prohibited area and the next two hundred metres as a regulated area.

He found the Survey starved of money and nearly wound up, restored its budget, appointed John Marshall as Director-General in 1902 and carried the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904, the first law in India that let the government protect a monument and stop its owner from damaging or exporting…

The correct answer is B, Daya Ram Sahni, who dug at Harappa on the bank of the Ravi in 1921 while John Marshall was Director-General, and who ten years later became the first Indian to head the Survey.

The Survey is an attached office of that ministry, has its head office in New Delhi and divides the country into circles, each under a Superintending Archaeologist, which look after the monuments and sites declared to be of national importance.

An engineer of the Bengal Engineers who had surveyed Sarnath and Sanchi long before the Survey existed, he was appointed its first Archaeological Surveyor in 1861 and its first Director-General in 1871, and he used the travel accounts of the Chinese pilgrims Faxian and Xuanzang to identify ancient cities with…

The Survey was set up in that year, in the first years of Crown rule after the revolt of 1857, with Alexander Cunningham as its first Archaeological Surveyor, and it was reorganised as a full department with Cunningham as Director-General in 1871.

Connell showed in the field that on the intertidal rocks of the Scottish coast the larger and faster-growing barnacle Balanus physically crowds out the smaller Chathamalus wherever the two settle together, so that Chathamalus survives only higher up the shore where Balanus cannot tolerate the exposure.

In a mycorrhiza the threads of a fungus grow around or inside the fine roots of a plant and greatly extend the surface from which minerals, especially phosphorus, can be absorbed from the soil.

Brood parasitism is the habit of laying eggs in the nest of another species and letting the host bird incubate them and feed the young.

In amensalism one species is harmed while the other neither gains nor loses, a pattern written as minus and zero.

Rhizobium lives inside the nodules on the roots of legumes such as gram, pea, groundnut and arhar. The bacterium converts atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, a form the plant can absorb and build into proteins, while the plant supplies the bacterium with shelter and with sugars made in photosynthesis.

Robert Paine removed the predatory starfish Pisaster from rocky intertidal pools and found that within a short time the mussels it had been eating took over the rock surface and crowded out other animals, so that more than ten invertebrate species were lost from the pools.

The Russian ecologist G. F. Gause worked with cultures of Paramecium and concluded that when two species need exactly the same limited resource in the same space, one of them is always eliminated in the long run; this is the competitive exclusion principle, also called Gause's principle.

Prickly pear cactus was taken to Australia in the nineteenth century and spread uncontrollably over grazing land because no local animal fed on it.