UPSC GK Questions 2026

Shipping and navigation on inland waterways declared by Parliament to be national waterways is a Union List subject, which is why a central Act is needed to declare each waterway.

The Barak between Lakhipur and Bhanga, about 121 km, serves the Barak valley of southern Assam, and through Karimganj it joins the protocol route across Bangladesh, which makes it the lifeline of a region cut off from the rest of Assam by hills.

National Waterway 3 runs 205 km from Kollam to Kottapuram along the West Coast Canal and includes the Champakara and Udyogmandal canals, which serve the industrial belt near Kochi.

The National Waterways Act, 2016 brought together in one statute the five waterways already declared between 1986 and 2008 and added many more, making 111 in all, spread over rivers, canals, creeks, estuaries and backwaters in most states of the country.

The Authority came into being in 1986 under the Inland Waterways Authority of India Act, 1985, and its headquarters is at Noida in Uttar Pradesh.

National Waterway 2 follows the Brahmaputra for 891 km inside Assam, from Dhubri on the Bangladesh border to Sadiya in the upper valley, and its principal terminal is Pandu near Guwahati.

The correct answer is C, 1,620 km, which makes National Waterway 1 the longest of India's national waterways and the one with the largest cargo movement.

National Waterway 1 runs 1,620 km from Haldia in West Bengal to Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh, through West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and was the first waterway to be declared national, in 1986.

The correct answer is A, the Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park at Darjeeling, the highest altitude zoo in India, which runs recognised conservation breeding programmes for the red panda, the snow leopard and the Himalayan wolf, and has released captive-bred red pandas into the Singalila landscape.

The correct answer is B, Kuno National Park in the Sheopur area of Madhya Pradesh, where cheetahs brought from Namibia and South Africa were released from 2022 under the cheetah reintroduction project; the cheetah had been declared extinct in India in 1952.

The breeding centres stand in the Jaisalmer region, near the Desert National Park, which holds the largest surviving population of the bird, and they are run by the state forest department with the Wildlife Institute of India: eggs are collected from the wild, hatched in incubators and the chicks reared…

The correct answer is C, about minus 196 degrees Celsius, the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, at which all metabolic activity in the stored material stops and the germplasm can be kept for very long periods without change.

These seeds lose their viability when their moisture content is reduced, so they cannot be kept in the cold rooms of a seed bank; mango, jackfruit, coconut, cocoa and most tropical fruit trees are examples, and they are conserved instead in field gene banks, as tissue cultures or in cryobanks.

The Botanical Survey of India was founded in 1890 with its headquarters in Kolkata, close to the Indian Botanic Garden at Howrah, and it surveys the plant resources of the country, publishes floras and maintains herbaria and botanical gardens through its regional circles.

The correct answer is A, the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources at New Delhi, an institute of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, which holds the National Gene Bank where seeds of crop plants and their wild relatives are stored at low temperature for long-term conservation.

The correct answer is B, Robert Kyd, an officer of the East India Company who proposed and founded the garden at Shibpur in Howrah in 1787, first for growing plants of economic value such as teak and spices.

The correct answer is B, the Alipore Zoological Garden in Kolkata, opened to the public in 1876 and therefore the oldest formally established zoo in the country.

The amendment of 1991 inserted the provisions on zoos into that Act, and the Central Zoo Authority was constituted in 1992 to recognise zoos, prescribe standards for animal housing, upkeep and veterinary care and coordinate conservation breeding; a zoo without its recognition cannot operate.

Ex-situ conservation means keeping a species, or only its germplasm, outside its natural habitat, which is what a botanical garden, a zoo, an aquarium, a seed bank, a gene bank or a conservation breeding centre does.

Statement 1 is wrong: the Constitution nowhere says that the senior-most judge must become Chief Justice of India; seniority is a convention and the Memorandum of Procedure records it, not Article 124.