UPSC GK Questions 2026

Brass is made by melting copper with zinc, and the resulting homogeneous mixture is harder than copper, easier to cast and machine and gives the familiar yellow colour used for utensils, fittings and musical instruments.

When two miscible liquids boil at temperatures far apart, ordinary distillation is enough, because the more volatile liquid boils off almost completely before the other begins.

Kerosene and water do not mix, so on standing they form two distinct layers with the lighter kerosene above the denser water.

Milk is an emulsion in which tiny globules of fat are dispersed through water, and those globules fall within the colloidal size range, so milk looks uniform to the eye, does not separate on standing, passes through filter paper and shows the Tyndall effect.

The particles of a colloid are between one and one thousand nanometres across, which is large enough to scatter a beam of light sideways and make the path of the beam visible.

Common salt is sodium chloride, in which sodium and chlorine are chemically combined in a fixed ratio by mass, and the result has properties quite unlike either element, since sodium reacts violently with water and chlorine is a poisonous gas while their compound is eaten daily.

Samskara is his best known novel, set in a Brahmin village thrown into crisis by the question of who may perform the last rites of a man who had broken every rule of the community, and it is read as a central text of modern Kannada fiction; its author received…

Allasani Peddana was the foremost of the eight poets of the court of Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara, a group known as the Ashtadiggajas, and he wrote Manucharitra, which earned him the title Andhra Kavita Pitamaha, the grandfather of Telugu poetry; the reign is remembered as the golden age of Telugu, and…

Kanyasulkam, meaning bride price, was written against the custom of selling young girls in marriage to much older men, and it broke new ground by using spoken Telugu rather than the literary dialect, which is why it is counted as the first modern play in the language.

Chemmeen, whose title means prawn, is set among the fishing people of the Kerala coast and turns on the belief that the sea will not spare a fisherman whose wife has been unfaithful; it is the best known Malayalam novel outside the language.

Indulekha, published in the late nineteenth century, is treated as the first major Malayalam novel and tells the story of an educated young woman of a Nair household who refuses an arranged match, which made it a social argument as much as a story.

His Adhyatma Ramayanam, written in the kilippattu or parrot-song form in which a bird narrates the story, settled the vocabulary, script and metre of literary Malayalam and put the Ramayana within reach of ordinary readers, which is why he carries this title.

The vachanas are short, direct compositions in the rhythmic Kannada of ordinary speech, carrying devotion to Shiva together with a sharp attack on caste and empty ritual, and they belong to the Veerashaiva or Lingayat movement of the twelfth century, of which Basavanna was the central figure; the woman saint…

He was awarded the Jnanpith in 1970 for Ramayana Kalpavrukshamu, a retelling of the Ramayana in Telugu verse, and he was the first Telugu writer to receive the prize.

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.