UPSC GK Questions 2026

The cash reserve ratio is the proportion of a bank's net demand and time liabilities that it must keep as cash with the Reserve Bank of India, on which it earns no interest, and the statutory liquidity ratio is the proportion it must maintain in its own hands in the…

The Lorenz curve plots the cumulative share of income against the cumulative share of population, so a straight diagonal would mean perfect equality and the more the curve sags away from that line the greater the inequality.

It is the hardest condition for policy to handle, because the remedy for inflation is to squeeze demand while the remedy for unemployment is to expand it, so no single step cures both; the classic episode followed the oil price shocks of the nineteen seventies.

The fiscal deficit of a year contains the cost of servicing past borrowing as well as fresh spending, so taking out interest payments leaves the primary deficit, which shows how far the present year's expenditure exceeds its receipts on its own account.

Gross domestic product counts what is produced inside the domestic territory, whoever produces it, while gross national product counts what is produced by the normal residents of the country, wherever they are; the bridge between them is net factor income from abroad, which is the income Indians earn abroad minus…

Indian statistical practice treats persons aged fifteen to fifty-nine years as the working age population, and the labour force is made up of those among them who are either working or seeking and available for work.

The repo rate is the rate at which the Reserve Bank of India lends short-term money to commercial banks against the collateral of government securities under a repurchase agreement, which is where the name repo comes from; it is the policy rate announced by the Monetary Policy Committee and the…

It arises when the structure of the economy changes, so that the jobs being created need skills different from those the available workers possess; it lasts long and is cured by retraining and education rather than by a revival of demand.

Disguised unemployment, also called hidden unemployment, exists where more persons are engaged in a job than are actually needed, so withdrawing one of them would not reduce output at all; that worker's marginal contribution is therefore zero.

It is a constructive plate margin, where molten rock rises and new ocean floor is created, and its highest peaks break the surface as islands such as Iceland and the Azores.

The tide generating force of a body is not simply its gravitational pull but the difference in that pull across the earth, and that difference falls off as the cube of the distance rather than the square.

A seamount is an isolated volcanic peak rising from the deep sea floor without reaching the surface; where such a peak once stood at sea level and had its top worn flat by waves before subsiding, it is called a guyot.

The correct answer is C, Lake Van in Turkey, which records a salinity of about 330 parts per thousand, the highest figure given in standard textbooks.

Salinity is expressed in parts per thousand, so 35 ppt means 35 grams of dissolved salt in a kilogram of sea water.

The correct answer is B, the Bay of Fundy, between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in Canada, where the funnel shape of the bay and the length of the inlet make the incoming tide pile up to a range of the order of fifteen to sixteen metres.

On these days the sun, the moon and the earth lie in a straight line, a position called syzygy, so the pulls of the sun and the moon act together and the tidal range is at its greatest; spring tides therefore occur twice in a lunar month and have nothing…

It is the gently sloping, shallow margin of the continent, extending to a depth of about 200 metres with a gradient of one degree or less and an average width of about seventy to eighty kilometres, and it makes up roughly 7.5 per cent of the ocean area.

The correct answer is B, the Mariana Trench, in the western Pacific Ocean, whose Challenger Deep reaches a depth of about eleven kilometres and is the deepest known point on the earth's surface.

Statement I is wrong because the equatorial belt receives very heavy rainfall and has high cloud cover, so the surface water there is diluted; the highest salinity in the open ocean is recorded in the subtropical high pressure belts, roughly between twenty and thirty degrees of latitude, where skies are…

While the ice floats it displaces a volume of water whose weight equals the weight of the ice, by the law of flotation.