UPSC GK Questions 2026

The eight core industries are coal, crude oil, natural gas, refinery products, fertilisers, steel, cement and electricity, so options A, B and D are all on the list.

Fertiliser output is important for agriculture and is watched before every sowing season, but the value of the industry's production is small beside refining or steel, which is why its weight is light and a big percentage swing in fertilisers barely moves the combined index.

Refining turns crude oil into petrol, diesel, kerosene, naphtha and feedstock for chemicals, and the value of that output is so large that a shutdown at a big refinery shows up in the national figure.

The Office of the Economic Adviser, which sits in the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, compiles the Index of Eight Core Industries and also the Wholesale Price Index, and it publishes the core sector figure every month.

The eight core industries are the energy and basic material industries on which the rest of manufacturing depends, and because they make up two-fifths of the IIP their monthly index is read as an advance signal of what the fuller index will report a little later.

In 2017 the base year of the IIP was shifted to 2011-12, the item basket was refreshed to take in goods that had become important since the previous revision, and the weights were recalculated from the gross value added shares of that year.

Mining, option A, has 14.37 per cent, and electricity, option C, has 7.99 per cent, so the three add up to a hundred.

The IIP is confined to the industrial sector and has exactly three components, mining, manufacturing and electricity, which are options A, B and C. Agriculture and the whole of the services sector, which together account for the larger part of India's output, lie outside the index, and that is why…

It works under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, gathers production returns from more than a dozen source agencies spread across ministries, and publishes the IIP every month as a Quick Estimate that is revised as fuller data come in.

Tropical thorn forest and scrub is the natural vegetation of the semi-arid belt that runs through Rajasthan, Gujarat, Haryana, south-western Punjab, western Madhya Pradesh and parts of the Deccan interior, where rainfall falls short of 70 centimetres.

Sholas are small, dense, stunted evergreen forests that survive in the sheltered valleys and folds of the high hills of the Western Ghats above about 1,500 metres, and they alternate with rolling grassland to form the shola grassland mosaic, a habitat of the Nilgiri tahr.

It works under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, has its headquarters at Dehradun, maps the forest and tree cover of the country with satellite imagery and field checks, and brings out the India State of Forest Report once every two years.

The National Forest Policy of 1952 fixed the goal of keeping about one-third of the total land area of the country under forest, with a larger share in the hills and mountains, where slopes need tree cover to hold the soil, and a smaller share in the plains.

Harry Champion and S. K. Seth revised the earlier survey of Indian forest types in 1968 and grouped the forests into major groups such as moist tropical, dry tropical, montane subtropical, montane temperate, sub-alpine and alpine, each divided further into types, using the climatic controls of rainfall, humidity and temperature.

Mangroves grow in the salty, waterlogged mud of deltas and creeks, where the soil holds almost no oxygen, so the roots send up narrow pegs called pneumatophores above the mud surface to breathe, and many species also stand on arching stilt roots for support in the soft ground.

The sundari, whose botanical name is Heritiera fomes, is the dominant mangrove of the Ganga and Brahmaputra delta and gives the Sundarbans its name; its timber is hard and was long used for boats and posts.

These forests grow where annual rainfall exceeds 200 centimetres, on the windward western slopes of the Western Ghats, in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, in upper Assam and along the hills of the north-east.

Melocanna baccifera, the muli bamboo, covers large tracts of Mizoram and the neighbouring hills and flowers only once in about half a century, after which the whole stand dies.

Indian forests are classified administratively into reserved, protected and unclassed forests, and the first two together are described as the permanent forest estate, that is land maintained permanently for timber and other forest produce and for the protection of soil and water.

Tropical deciduous forest is called monsoon forest because it is the natural vegetation of the monsoon climate, growing where rainfall lies between 70 and 200 centimetres and where a marked dry season follows the rains.