UPSC GK Questions 2026

The second Guru standardised and popularised Gurmukhi, the script in which the hymns of the Gurus were written down, and this made it possible to preserve the teaching of the movement in the language its followers actually spoke.

Amir Khusrau served as a poet at the courts of several Delhi Sultans, but his spiritual allegiance was to Nizamuddin Auliya, and he was buried beside his master.

Mahbub-i-Ilahi means the beloved of God, and it is the title by which this Chishti master of Delhi has been known for seven centuries.

A khanqah was the hospice or lodge where a Sufi master lived with his disciples, taught, held assemblies of devotional music and fed whoever came to the door, whatever their faith or caste.

The National Securities Depository Limited was set up in 1996, the year the Depositories Act was passed, and was the first depository in India; it holds securities in electronic form so that shares need not change hands as paper certificates, a process called dematerialisation.

It defines what a security is, provides for the recognition of stock exchanges by the Government, and lays down the framework within which contracts in securities may be made; it is the oldest of the statutes governing this market and still the basic one.

SEBI has its head office in Mumbai, at the Bandra Kurla Complex, which places the regulator in the same city as the Bombay Stock Exchange, the National Stock Exchange and the Reserve Bank of India, making Mumbai the financial capital of the country.

An IPO is the first sale of shares by a company to the general public, after which the shares are listed and traded on a stock exchange; it belongs to the primary market, because the money raised goes to the company itself.

A person aggrieved by an order of SEBI may appeal to the Tribunal, which is provided for by the SEBI Act itself, and from the Tribunal a further appeal lies to the Supreme Court on a question of law.

The money market deals in short-term funds of up to one year, through treasury bills, commercial paper, certificates of deposit and call money, and the Reserve Bank regulates it as part of its control over credit and liquidity.

The Sensex was compiled backwards to 1978-79 and that year was given a base value of 100, so the index number states how many times the market value of its thirty constituents has grown since then.

The Sensex, or Sensitive Index, of the Bombay Stock Exchange is built from thirty large, well established and actively traded companies drawn from the main sectors of the economy, and it is weighted by free-float market capitalisation.

It was founded in 1875 as the Native Share and Stock Brokers’ Association, grew out of brokers meeting under a banyan tree in Bombay, and is the oldest stock exchange in Asia; it now stands on Dalal Street and its benchmark index is the Sensex.

SEBI first appeared in April 1988 as an administrative arrangement with no legal powers, and it became a statutory regulator when the Securities and Exchange Board of India Act was passed in 1992; the words quoted in the question are taken from the preamble of that Act, which speaks of…

Sambhar lies west of Jaipur in a shallow depression with no outlet to the sea; water that flows in can only evaporate, leaving behind the salt that has made the lake a major source of common salt for centuries.

Bhakra is built across the Sutlej at the Bhakra gorge on the border of Himachal Pradesh and Punjab, is the highest straight gravity dam in India, and the lake it holds is named Gobind Sagar after Guru Gobind Singh.

Loktak in Manipur is covered with phumdis, floating mats of soil and decaying vegetation thick enough to walk on, and the southern part of the lake was declared Keibul Lamjao National Park, the only floating national park in the world and the last natural home of the sangai or brow-antlered…

The Tehri dam stands in the Tehri Garhwal district of Uttarakhand, just below the point where the Bhilangana joins the Bhagirathi, and it is the tallest dam in India; it supplies power, drinking water and irrigation, and its construction submerged the old town of Tehri.

Chilika lies along the coast of Odisha, separated from the Bay of Bengal by a long sand bar, and its mixture of fresh and sea water supports one of the largest wintering grounds for migratory birds in the subcontinent as well as a population of Irrawaddy dolphins.

It lies in the Kashmir valley, is fed by the Jhelum, and is the largest freshwater lake in India; it acts as a natural flood absorber for the valley and is a designated wetland of international importance.