UPSC GK Questions 2026

The Imperial Library was created by the Imperial Library Act of 1902 and opened to readers in 1903 on Curzon’s initiative; he merged the collections of the Calcutta Public Library of 1836 with the Home Department secretariat libraries to form a single library of record.

The National Library of India stands in the Belvedere Estate at Alipore in Kolkata, in a building that was once the residence of the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal.

The Salar Jung Museum stands on the south bank of the Musi river at Hyderabad and holds the collection built up mainly by Mir Yousuf Ali Khan, Salar Jung III, the Prime Minister of the Nizam of Hyderabad.

It was founded in 1814 by the Asiatic Society of Bengal and is the oldest museum in India as well as the largest multipurpose museum in the country, with sections for art, archaeology, anthropology, geology, zoology and economic botany.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, created at Shanghai in 2001 out of the Shanghai Five of 1996, keeps its Secretariat at Beijing and its Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure, usually shortened to RATS, at Tashkent in Uzbekistan, where it coordinates intelligence and joint exercises against terrorism, separatism and extremism.

SAFTA was signed at the twelfth SAARC summit held at Islamabad in 2004 and came into force on 1 January 2006, replacing the SAARC Preferential Trading Arrangement, which had been signed in 1993 and had come into force in 1995.

BIMSTEC has seven members: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand, of which five are in South Asia and two in Southeast Asia.

The BIMSTEC Secretariat was opened at Dhaka in Bangladesh in 2014, seventeen years after the grouping was created by the Bangkok Declaration of 6 June 1997.

The ASEAN Secretariat has been at Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, since 1976, and it supports the summits, the ministerial councils and the three community pillars into which the grouping's work was organised in 2015.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations was created on 8 August 1967 by the Bangkok Declaration, also called the ASEAN Declaration, signed by the foreign ministers of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand; 8 August is observed as ASEAN Day.

SAARC began with seven members, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan was admitted as the eighth member at the fourteenth summit held in New Delhi in 2007, making it the only country to have joined the grouping after its founding.

The SAARC Secretariat was established at Kathmandu in Nepal on 16 January 1987 and is headed by a Secretary-General chosen from the member states in turn; it coordinates the work of the technical committees and the regional centres.

The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation came into being on 8 December 1985, when the heads of state and government of seven South Asian countries adopted its Charter at the first summit in Dhaka; the proposal had been made by President Ziaur Rahman of Bangladesh at the start of…

The seventeenth SAARC summit was held in November 2011 at Addu City in the Maldives, the country's second largest urban area, on Addu Atoll in the far south of the chain, and its theme was building bridges.

A credit score is built only from credit behaviour reported by lenders, so income, the balance in a savings account, the deposits held with a bank, and matters such as caste or religion are not part of it; a lender looks at income separately when it assesses whether a borrower…

The Reserve Bank has directed every credit information company to provide one free full credit report to an individual once in each calendar year, on request, so that a borrower can check the record and have an error corrected before applying for a loan.

The correct answer is C, in default or expected to be in default soon.

On the standardised long-term scale, AAA means the highest degree of safety for the timely servicing of interest and principal, followed by AA for high safety, A for adequate safety and BBB for moderate safety, and running down through BB, B and C to D for default.

CARE is a credit rating agency registered with SEBI, which rates debt instruments and the companies that issue them; it does not keep the credit histories of individuals.

The Investment Information and Credit Rating Agency of India Limited was set up in 1991 with the Industrial Finance Corporation of India as its promoter, and Moody's later acquired a majority stake in it.