UPSC GK Questions 2026

The Godavari rises in the Western Ghats at Trimbakeshwar in the Nashik district of Maharashtra and flows east across the peninsula to the Bay of Bengal, draining the second largest basin in India after the Ganga.

The Godavari is about 1,465 kilometres long, rises at Trimbakeshwar near Nashik in Maharashtra, crosses Telangana, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh and falls into the Bay of Bengal, all within India, which makes it the longest river flowing wholly inside the country.

The Musi rises in the Anantagiri hills of Telangana, flows through Hyderabad, and joins the Krishna in Nalgonda district, which is why the city's water supply and floods are tied to it.

In the Rigveda the Ravi appears as the Parushni, and it is on this river that the Battle of the Ten Kings, the Dasarajna, is placed.

The Sutlej rises from the Rakas lake near Mansarovar in Tibet, where it is called the Langchen Khambab, and enters India through the Shipki La pass in Himachal Pradesh before flowing on to join the Beas at Harike.

The Tons is a tributary of the Yamuna in the Ganga system, rising in the Garhwal Himalaya, and has nothing to do with the Brahmaputra basin.

Hydrofluorocarbons were adopted as substitutes for chlorofluorocarbons in refrigeration and air conditioning because they do not harm the ozone layer, but they turned out to be very powerful greenhouse gases, so the Kigali Amendment of 2016 brought them under the Montreal Protocol with a schedule for reducing their use.

The day marks the signing of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer in 1987 and is observed every year with a theme announced by the United Nations.

Marble is calcium carbonate, and sulphur dioxide in polluted air, along with the sulphuric acid of acid rain, reacts with it to form calcium sulphate, so the stone loses its shine, turns yellow and becomes pitted and flaky.

These gases come from burning coal and oil in thermal power stations, smelters and vehicles, are oxidised in the atmosphere and dissolve in water droplets to form sulphuric acid and nitric acid, which come down as acid rain.

The Montreal Protocol was adopted in 1987 under the Vienna Convention of 1985 and sets the timetable by which countries must stop producing and using chlorofluorocarbons, halons, carbon tetrachloride, methyl chloroform and methyl bromide.

The Dobson unit, named after the scientist who built the instrument for measuring atmospheric ozone, expresses how thick the ozone column would be if all of it were brought down to the surface at standard temperature and pressure; a hundred Dobson units correspond to a layer one millimetre thick.

About nine tenths of the atmosphere's ozone lies in the stratosphere, roughly fifteen to thirty five kilometres above the surface, where ultraviolet rays split oxygen molecules and the free atoms combine with other oxygen molecules to make ozone.

Nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide, together written as nitrogen oxides, are air pollutants that come mainly from combustion in vehicles and power stations; they help form smog and acid rain but are not counted among the greenhouse gases of the natural atmosphere.

A primary pollutant is released directly from a source, while a secondary pollutant is formed in the atmosphere when primary pollutants react.

Each of the other three statements is correct on its own, which is exactly why the combined option is the answer.

Khandesh was ruled by the Faruqi dynasty, which set itself up in the Tapi valley in the late fourteenth century independently of the Bahmanis, and it was annexed by Akbar in 1601; it never formed part of the Bahmani kingdom and so did not emerge from its break-up.

Mahmud Gawan, the Persian-born wazir of Muhammad Shah III who held the title Malik-ut-Tujjar, built a madrasa at Bidar in 1472.

Abdur Razzaq was sent by Shah Rukh, the Timurid ruler of Herat, and reached Vijayanagara in 1443, when Deva Raya II of the Sangama dynasty was on the throne.

Amuktamalyada is a Telugu poem on the life of the Tamil saint Andal that also sets out the duties of a king, and it was composed by Krishnadevaraya himself, which is why he is remembered as a poet-king with the title Andhra Bhoja.