UPSC GK Questions 2026

Carbon dioxide is a trace gas, roughly four hundredths of one per cent of dry air by volume, yet it is the source of all the carbon that photosynthesis fixes into food and the chief gas by which human activity is warming the planet.

Transpiration is the escape of water vapour from a plant, chiefly through the stomata of the leaves, and over a forest or a crop field it returns a large volume of water to the air; together with evaporation from open surfaces it is called evapotranspiration.

About ninety-seven per cent of the water on earth is salt water in the oceans, and of the small freshwater remainder the greater part is locked up as ice in glaciers and the polar ice sheets, with most of what is left held as groundwater.

The very high temperature of a lightning discharge supplies enough energy to break the triple bond of nitrogen, and the atoms join oxygen to give nitric oxide and then nitrogen dioxide, which dissolve in rain as nitrous and nitric acid and reach the soil as nitrate; this is physical or…

Nitrogenase is the enzyme complex, containing molybdenum and iron, that breaks the triple bond of the nitrogen molecule and joins the atoms with hydrogen to make ammonia; it is destroyed by oxygen, which is why a root nodule keeps leghaemoglobin to mop oxygen up.

Dry air is about seventy-eight per cent nitrogen by volume, which makes the atmosphere the great reservoir of the nitrogen cycle, yet the triple bond of the nitrogen molecule is so strong that plants and animals cannot use the gas directly and depend on fixation.

Denitrification is the reduction of nitrate to nitrogen gas, which escapes to the atmosphere and completes the nitrogen cycle; it is carried out by these bacteria in waterlogged soils where oxygen is scarce, and it is the reason farmers lose nitrogen from flooded fields.

Nitrification happens in two stages, and the first is the oxidation of ammonia to nitrite by chemoautotrophic bacteria of the genera Nitrosomonas and Nitrococcus.

Rhizobium is a bacterium that lives in a symbiotic relationship with legumes such as gram, pea, bean, groundnut and arhar, forming nodules on their roots in which it converts nitrogen gas into ammonia using the enzyme nitrogenase; this is why legumes are grown in rotation to restore soil nitrogen.

Phosphorus has no stable gaseous compound in nature, so its reservoir is rock, chiefly the mineral apatite; it enters the soil only through slow weathering, passes through plants and animals, and returns to sediments, which makes it a purely sedimentary cycle and the slowest of the common cycles.

Humus is the dark, formless material left in soil after decomposers have broken down dead leaves, roots and animal remains; it resists further microbial attack and decays only very slowly, which makes it the long term store of carbon and nutrients in soil and a key step in every biogeochemical…

The Ministry of AYUSH was created on 9 November 2014 by upgrading the existing department, so that the traditional systems of medicine would have a ministry and a minister of their own.

These three are the Brihat Trayi, the great triad of Ayurvedic literature: Charaka on internal medicine, Sushruta on surgery and Vagbhata summarising both in the Ashtanga Hridaya.

Ibn Sina, called Avicenna in Europe, compiled Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb, the Canon of Medicine, which organised the medical knowledge of his age into a single system and was taught in Asian and European schools for centuries; it remains a basic text of Unani medicine.

Hahnemann was a German physician who set out the principles of homoeopathy in the Organon of Medicine, chief among them the maxim similia similibus curentur, let like be cured by like, together with the law of the minimum dose and the method of potentisation.

The United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution on 11 December 2014 declaring 21 June the International Day of Yoga, and the day was observed for the first time in 2015.

Patanjali compiled the Yoga Sutras, the foundational text of the yoga school of Indian philosophy, and in it he lays out Ashtanga Yoga, the eight limbs: Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi.

The Sushruta Samhita is the classical Indian treatise on Shalya Tantra, surgery, and it describes operations for cataract and for bladder stone, the repair of a severed nose that later writers called rhinoplasty, the eight kinds of surgical procedure and a long list of surgical instruments, which is why Sushruta…

Sowa-Rigpa, the science of healing, is the Amchi system of medicine practised in the Himalayan belt of Ladakh, Lahaul and Spiti, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and the Darjeeling hills, and its foundational text is the Gyud-Zhi or Four Tantras.

In Ujjayi the throat is slightly narrowed while breathing through the nose, so the air makes a soft continuous hiss that is commonly compared with the sound of the sea or of waves; for that reason it is called the ocean breath, and the name itself means victorious.