UPSC GK Questions 2026

Nannaya, Tikkana and Errana are called the Kavitrayam, the trinity of poets, because between them they rendered the Mahabharata into Telugu over the course of several centuries; Nannaya, the Adikavi of Telugu, began the work and also wrote the grammar Andhra Shabda Chintamani, while Errana continued and Tikkana completed it.

Kuvempu, whose full name was K. V. Puttappa, was awarded the Jnanpith in 1967 for this long poem, a retelling of the Ramayana in modern Kannada, and he was the first Kannada writer to receive the prize; he also wrote the state song of Karnataka.

Pampa wrote in the tenth century and is called the Adikavi of Kannada on the strength of two works, Vikramarjuna Vijaya, also known as Pampa Bharata, which retells the Mahabharata with his patron in the place of Arjuna, and Adipurana, on the life of the first Jain Tirthankara.

The first Jnanpith Award was conferred for the year 1965 on the Malayalam poet G. Sankara Kurup for his collection Odakkuzhal, which means the reed flute; the prize itself had been instituted in 1961 by the Bharatiya Jnanpith.

Thomas Graham found in 1833 that a light gas spreads through a porous partition faster than a heavy one, and that the rates of two gases are in the inverse ratio of the square roots of their densities, and therefore of their molar masses.

At ordinary atmospheric pressure carbon dioxide has no liquid stage: the solid passes straight into vapour at about minus 78.5 degrees Celsius.

In a liquid the resistance to flow comes mainly from the attraction between neighbouring molecules. Heating gives the molecules energy to slip past one another, so the attraction matters less and the liquid thins; hot honey and warm engine oil pour far more easily than cold.

Evaporation is a surface phenomenon in which the fastest-moving molecules of a liquid break free. Doing so needs the latent heat of vaporisation, and that energy is drawn from the liquid left behind and from whatever the liquid touches, so both grow cooler.

This is the heat one gram of ice at 0 degrees Celsius must absorb to become one gram of water at 0 degrees Celsius; the temperature does not rise at all while it melts, because the energy goes into breaking the hydrogen-bonded lattice.

Bromine is a dark reddish-brown, dense, fuming liquid at ordinary room temperature, with a melting point of about minus 7 degrees Celsius and a boiling point of about 59 degrees Celsius.

Plasma is a hot, electrically conducting mixture of free electrons and positive ions produced when a gas is heated or strongly ionised.

Water contracts as it is cooled from higher temperatures like any other liquid, but only down to 4 degrees Celsius.

Boyle s law applies to a fixed mass of gas at constant temperature and states that pressure is inversely proportional to volume, so the product of the two is a constant: P1 into V1 equals P2 into V2.

In 1924 Satyendra Nath Bose sent Albert Einstein a paper deriving Planck s radiation law by counting indistinguishable light quanta.

A change of state is governed by the energy of the particles. When a solid absorbs heat its particles vibrate harder until the force holding them in the lattice is overcome and it melts; further heat lets the liquid particles escape as vapour.

Trained as a physicist, she turned to agriculture and founded Navdanya, a network of community seed banks that collects, stores and freely exchanges traditional varieties of rice, millet, pulses and oilseeds, and that campaigns against the patenting of seed and of plants long used in India.

The Tawa project on a tributary of the Narmada in Hoshangabad district of Madhya Pradesh brought canal irrigation to black cotton soil that already held water well.

From the late nineteen seventies Jadav Payeng planted saplings year after year on a bare, eroding sandbar of the Brahmaputra near Majuli, and the patch grew into a forest of several hundred hectares that is now called the Molai forest after him.

In 1982 the government proposed to convert the natural sal forests of Singhbhum, then in Bihar and now in Jharkhand, into plantations of teak, which fetches a far higher price as timber.

He carried the Chipko message on foot across the Himalaya and summed up its argument in the phrase that ecology is permanent economy, meaning that a standing forest yields soil, water and pure air for ever while felled timber yields money once.