UPSC GK Questions 2026

In the old Magadh region of south Bihar the land slopes gently and the soil holds water poorly, so farmers cut long channels, the pynes, from the flood flow of rivers such as the Phalgu, Sakri and Morhar and led the water across the fields.

In the Khasi and Jaintia hills, spring and stream water on a hill slope is tapped and carried through a network of split bamboo pipes, channels and diversion sticks that step the flow down the slope and finally release it drop by drop at the root of each betel vine…

Zabo, a word that means impounding runoff, is practised around Kikruma village in the Phek district of Nagaland.

A tanka is a covered underground tank, usually sunk in a courtyard or beneath a house in western Rajasthan, into which rain falling on the paved courtyard or the roof is led through a filter and stored for drinking right through the dry months.

The correct answer is B, Xuanzang, who travelled overland through Central Asia in the seventh century, spent years in India in the reign of Harshavardhana, studied at the monastery of Nalanda under Silabhadra, and carried manuscripts back to China, where he translated them and left the fullest foreign account of…

The name is the Thai form of Ayodhya, the city of Rama in the Ramayana, and it fits a court whose epic was the Ramakien and whose kings bore the title Rama.

It was translated into Pahlavi in the Persian empire and from that version into Arabic as Kalila wa Dimna, the two names being those of the jackals of the stories, and from Arabic it passed into Persian, Syriac, Hebrew, Greek and Latin and then into the languages of Europe.

The correct answer is C, Kanishka, the Kushan ruler who called the fourth Buddhist council in Kashmir and under whose empire, stretching from the Gangetic plain into Central Asia, Mahayana Buddhism and the Gandhara and Mathura styles of sculpture travelled up the trade routes to Khotan, Kucha and Dunhuang.

The correct answer is B, Bodhidharma, remembered in tradition as a prince of the Pallava country in south India who travelled to China and taught a path resting on meditation rather than on scripture; the school he founded is Chan in Chinese and Zen in Japanese, and legend attaches him…

The kingdom of Champa held the central coast of what is now Vietnam for many centuries, used Sanskrit in its inscriptions and built brick temples to Shiva, of which the group at My Son is the largest and is a World Heritage site.

The two giant Buddhas were carved into a cliff in the Bamiyan valley, on the branch of the Silk Route that carried Buddhism from Gandhara into Central Asia, and they were destroyed in 2001; the valley remains on the World Heritage list for the surviving caves and paintings.

Ashoka sent his son Mahendra, known in the Pali chronicles as Mahinda, to Sri Lanka, where the king of the island received the teaching, and afterwards the nun Sanghamitra came with a branch of the Bodhi tree, which was planted at Anuradhapura.

The Ramakien is the Thai retelling of the Ramayana, painted along the galleries of the Emerald Buddha temple at Bangkok and performed in masked dance; the kings of the present Thai dynasty take the title Rama from it, and the old capital Ayutthaya is named after Ayodhya.

Borobudur was built in the eighth and ninth centuries by the Sailendra rulers of Java as a Buddhist monument in the form of a stepped pyramid whose galleries carry carved panels of the life and teaching of the Buddha, with seated Buddha images in open stupas on the upper terraces.

The Khmer king Suryavarman II raised Angkor Wat in the twelfth century in what is now Cambodia as a temple of Vishnu, and its scale makes it the largest Vishnu temple in the world; the building later came to be used as a Buddhist shrine and now appears on the…

India keeps 2 December as National Pollution Control Day because the leak of methyl isocyanate at Bhopal began on the night of 2 December 1984; the day is used to review pollution control laws and to remember those killed.

Parliament passed it under Article 253, to give effect to the Stockholm Conference decisions, and in the direct shadow of the Bhopal leak of December 1984.

The Tohoku earthquake of 11 March 2011 shut the reactors down as designed, but the tsunami that arrived minutes later flooded the emergency diesel generators at the Fukushima Daiichi plant on Japan's Pacific coast.

From 5 to 9 December 1952 an anticyclone settled over London, a temperature inversion trapped the smoke and sulphur dioxide of domestic coal fires, and the resulting smog killed thousands.

The Minamata Convention on Mercury was adopted at Kumamoto, Japan, in 2013 and entered into force in 2017.