UPSC GK Questions 2026

Raja Ravi Varma was born in 1848 at Kilimanoor, a palace in the princely state of Travancore in present-day Kerala, and he painted many portraits for the Travancore court.

The Senate of the United States has two members from every state, and with fifty states that makes a hundred Senators, each elected for six years, with the Vice-President of the United States presiding over the house.

The Eduskunta is the parliament of Finland; the parliament of Sweden is the Riksdag, a single house body.

The Jatiya Sangsad, or National Parliament, is the single house legislature of Bangladesh and sits in the Sangsad Bhaban at Dhaka.

The phrase comes from the nineteenth century reformer John Bright, who said that England is the mother of parliaments, and it stuck to the Parliament at Westminster because so many countries, India among them, took their form of government from it; that form is called the Westminster model.

The Oireachtas is the Parliament of Ireland and consists of the President with two houses, Dail Eireann, the lower and elected house, and Seanad Eireann, the upper house.

The joint sitting of the two houses, provided for in Article 108 and summoned by the President to resolve a deadlock on an ordinary Bill, was taken from the Australian Constitution, along with the concurrent list and the freedom of trade and commerce between the units.

The Malaysian Parliament has the Dewan Rakyat, the house of the people, as its elected lower house, and the Dewan Negara, the house of the nation, as its upper house, which represents the states and holds appointed members.

The Russian legislature is the Federal Assembly, and it has two houses: the State Duma, the lower house, whose members are elected, and the Federation Council, the upper house, which represents the regions of the federation.

It is a single house body with close to three thousand members, chosen indirectly by the provincial congresses and the armed forces, and no other legislature comes near that size.

The Althing was founded in 930 at Thingvellir, where free men gathered in the open to settle disputes and declare law, and it still functions as the legislature of Iceland, which makes it the oldest surviving parliament in the world.

The Japanese legislature is the Diet, called Kokkai in Japanese, and it is bicameral: the House of Representatives is the lower house and the House of Councillors the upper.

The Knesset is the single house legislature of Israel and has a fixed strength of 120 members elected by proportional representation; it sits at Jerusalem and its name comes from the assembly of the same size in ancient Jewish tradition.

Jangarh Singh Shyam of Patangarh in Madhya Pradesh took the Gond wall and floor decoration on to paper and canvas, filling his animals, trees and deities with dots and dashes, and the manner he created is called Jangarh Kalam after him; a generation of Gond painters followed it.

The Pattachitra palette is made at home from natural matter: white is ground from the conch shell, black from the soot of a lamp, red from hingula, yellow from haritala and blue from indigo, and the gum of the wood apple binds them to the cloth, which is finally given…

Sohrai is the harvest and cattle festival painting and Khovar the marriage painting of the Hazaribagh belt of Jharkhand, made by women who brush on coloured earths or scratch through a top layer of white clay to reveal the dark layer beneath, a technique called sgraffito; the tradition carries a…

The chauk is the ritual square that the married women of the household paint for a wedding, and within it they place Palaghata, the goddess of fertility, so that the painting is itself a blessing on the marriage.

Kalamkari means work of the pen, and its two centres lie in Andhra Pradesh: at Srikalahasti the design is drawn freehand with a bamboo pen and is temple-centred, while at Machilipatnam it is printed with carved wooden blocks for furnishing and dress.

Phad is a long scroll painted on cloth in the Shahpura and Bhilwara area of Rajasthan, traditionally by the Joshi families, and it carries the epics of the folk deities Pabuji and Devnarayan; the Bhopa priest-singer unrolls it at night and sings the story before it.

Jivya Soma Mashe of the Warli country in Maharashtra was the painter who began to paint every day rather than only at weddings and rituals, which is how Warli art moved from the wedding wall to paper, canvas and exhibitions abroad; he received the Padma Shri. Option A is wrong…