UPSC GK Questions 2026

The Dadasaheb Phalke Award was instituted in 1969 for lifetime contribution to Indian cinema, in memory of Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, who made Raja Harishchandra in 1913, the first Indian feature film, and the first award went to the actress Devika Rani.

The Nobel ceremonies are held on 10 December every year, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel in 1896; the prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and economic sciences are presented at Stockholm, while the peace prize is presented at Oslo.

The Jnanpith Award was instituted by the Bharatiya Jnanpith in 1961 and given for the first time in 1965 to the Malayalam poet G. Sankara Kurup for his collection Odakkuzhal.

The country's highest sporting honour was renamed the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award in 2021, after the hockey player whose birth anniversary on 29 August is observed as National Sports Day.

India's gallantry awards come in two families. For valour in the presence of the enemy the order is Param Vir Chakra, Maha Vir Chakra and Vir Chakra; for valour otherwise than in the face of the enemy the order is Ashoka Chakra, Kirti Chakra and Shaurya Chakra, so the Ashoka…

The list of Bharat Ratna and Padma awardees is released on 25 January, the eve of Republic Day, and the honours are conferred by the President at Rashtrapati Bhavan later in the year.

Tamil was declared a classical language in 2004, the first language to receive the status, on the strength of its ancient Sangam literature and an independent literary tradition.

Santali is an Austro-Asiatic language of the Munda group, spoken mainly in Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha, and Pandit Raghunath Murmu designed the Ol Chiki script for it so that it need not borrow a script from a neighbouring language.

Prinsep, an officer of the East India Company mint at Calcutta, deciphered the Brahmi script in 1837, which made the edicts of Ashoka readable and opened up the early history of India.

It states that the official language of the Union shall be Hindi in the Devanagari script and that the form of numerals to be used shall be the international form of Indian numerals; it also allowed English to continue for fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution, a period…

When the Constitution came into force in 1950 the Eighth Schedule listed 14 languages.

That amendment added four languages, Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali, to the Eighth Schedule and took the count from 18 to 22, where it stands.

Under Article 345 a State may adopt any language in use within it as its official language, and Uttar Pradesh has adopted Hindi as its official language and Urdu as its second official language.

The tribal languages of Jharkhand and the neighbouring belt of central and eastern India, namely Santali, Mundari, Ho and Kurukh's neighbours in the Munda group, belong to the Austro-Asiatic family, whose Indian branch is called Munda.

Kannada is one of the four major Dravidian languages, the others being Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam, and it is the official language of Karnataka.

There is no language family by that name in India. The Afro-Asiatic family, which the name echoes, covers Arabic, Hebrew and the Berber and Cushitic languages of West Asia and North Africa, and no Indian language belongs to it.

The Templeton Prize was instituted in 1972 by the investor John Templeton to honour work that explores the deepest questions of life and of the spirit, and Mother Teresa received the first award in 1973, six years before her Nobel Peace Prize.

It is named after Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who was the first High Commissioner for Refugees under the League of Nations and who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922.

It is named after Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear physicist who became a campaigner for civil liberties and himself won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.

Ramon Magsaysay was President of the Philippines and died in an air crash in 1957; the award was created in the same year in his memory, it is presented at Manila, and it honours greatness of spirit in service to the people of Asia.