UPSC GK Questions 2026

She presided over the eighth session of the General Assembly in 1953, the first woman to hold that office, and she had already led the Indian delegation to the United Nations in its earliest years; she was also the sister of Jawaharlal Nehru and later India envoy to Moscow, Washington…

Palau, in the Pacific, was the last of the eleven trust territories placed under the international trusteeship system, administered by the United States as part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands; it became independent on 1 October 1994, and the Trusteeship Council suspended its operations on 1 November…

The judges of the International Court of Justice are elected by the General Assembly and the Security Council voting independently of each other, a candidate needing an absolute majority in both, and five seats fall vacant every three years so that the bench is renewed in thirds.

The Security Council has fifteen members in all: five permanent members, namely China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, and ten non-permanent members elected by the General Assembly for two-year terms, five of them retiring each year, with a retiring member not immediately re-eligible.

The FAO was founded on 16 October 1945 at Quebec City, and World Food Day has been observed on that anniversary since 1981; the agency has its headquarters at Rome and runs the global work on hunger, nutrition and food statistics.

It was founded at Paris in 1865 as the International Telegraph Union to standardise telegraphy across borders, took its present name in 1932 as radio and telephony were added, moved to Geneva, and became a specialised agency of the United Nations in 1947; it now allocates the global radio spectrum…

Set up in 1957 with its headquarters at Vienna, the IAEA is an autonomous intergovernmental organisation that reports to the General Assembly and, when nuclear safeguards are at issue, to the Security Council; the United Nations describes it as a related organisation, not a specialised agency, because it was not…

The Court sits at the Peace Palace in The Hague in the Netherlands, where it took over the premises of the Permanent Court of International Justice of the League of Nations era.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has had its headquarters in Paris since it began work; its constitution was adopted in November 1945 and came into force in November 1946, and it is the agency that maintains the World Heritage List.

The Charter entered into force on that day, once the five permanent members of the Security Council and a majority of the other signatories had ratified it, and the day is observed every year as United Nations Day.

The Charter of the United Nations establishes six principal organs: the General Assembly, in which every member state has one vote; the Security Council, which carries the primary responsibility for international peace and security; the Economic and Social Council; the Trusteeship Council; the International Court of Justice; and the Secretariat.

He persuaded the Tata trusts to fund the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research at Bombay in 1945, became the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission set up in 1948, and founded the Atomic Energy Establishment at Trombay, which was renamed the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre after he died in…

He led the introduction of the high-yielding dwarf wheat varieties into Indian fields in the nineteen sixties, worked with the government on the package of seed, fertiliser and irrigation that turned the country from food imports to self-sufficiency, and received the first World Food Prize in 1987.

Meghnad Saha showed in 1920 how the degree to which a gas is ionised depends on its temperature and pressure, and the equation let astronomers read the temperature of a star directly from the lines in its spectrum and so classify stars in a physically meaningful way; it is counted…

He was born on 22 December 1887 at Erode, worked largely without formal training, and left results on infinite series, continued fractions, partitions and the mock theta functions that mathematicians are still developing; he worked with G. H. Hardy at Cambridge and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya was born on 15 September 1861, served as Diwan of Mysore, designed the automatic sluice gates used at the Krishna Raja Sagara dam and the block system of irrigation, planned flood protection for Hyderabad, and received the Bharat Ratna in 1955; the day is observed as Engineer Day…

He developed the probe that made DNA fingerprinting practicable in India at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology at Hyderabad, where the first Indian case used the technique in 1988; he later founded the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics and served as Vice-Chancellor of Banaras Hindu University.

He designed the crescograph, which magnifies the growth of a plant many thousand times so that it can be recorded, and used it and related instruments to argue that plants respond to light, heat, touch and other stimuli much as animals do.

Khorana shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 with Robert Holley and Marshall Nirenberg for showing how the sequence of nucleotides in nucleic acids specifies the amino acids of a protein; he later synthesised the first artificial gene, a landmark in molecular biology.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar showed, while still in his twenties, that a white dwarf heavier than about 1.44 times the mass of the Sun cannot be held up by the pressure of its degenerate electrons and must collapse further; the figure is called the Chandrasekhar limit, it underlies the modern account of…