UPSC GK Questions 2026

Self-reliance, the goal set out in India's early plans, means building the capacity to produce at home what the country would otherwise have to buy abroad, so the true indicator is that imports of such goods are avoided.

An inward-looking trade strategy, better known as import substitution, was the policy India followed from the Second Five Year Plan until 1991, and it rested on two instruments.

Export security is not a recognised category of trade barrier; it is not a device that restricts the movement of goods across a border.

The balance of payments is the statement that records every economic transaction between the residents of a country and the rest of the world in a given period, which is precisely what the external sector of an economy means; it covers merchandise trade, services, income, transfers and capital flows.

The eastern coastal plain is divided into three named stretches, and the southern one, running along Tamil Nadu, is the Coromandel coast; it receives much of its rain from the retreating north-east monsoon in October and November, unlike the rest of India.

Lying mainly in Jharkhand with parts in Odisha, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal, and drained by the Damodar, it holds India's richest concentration of coal along with iron ore, mica, bauxite and copper; the cluster of collieries, steel plants and power stations along the Damodar has earned it the nickname Ruhr…

The southern section of the western coastal plain, lying in Kerala, is called the Malabar coast, and it is distinguished by its kayals, the shallow lagoons and backwaters such as Vembanad and Ashtamudi that are linked into an inland waterway.

Towards the end of the Cretaceous period, fissure eruptions poured out sheet after sheet of lava over western and central India; the hardened lava is basalt and the stepped landscape it makes is called the Deccan Trap.

Chilika lies on the Utkal coast of Odisha, separated from the Bay of Bengal by a long sandbar, and it is the largest brackish-water lagoon in India, famous for its migratory birds and for its population of Irrawaddy dolphins.

The Narmada flows west between the Vindhyan range and the Satpuras along a trough formed by faulting, that is, a rift valley, and it empties into the Gulf of Khambhat through a broad estuary rather than a delta.

The Palakkad Gap, also spelt Palghat, is the widest break in the Western Ghats, lying between the Nilgiri hills to the north and the Anaimalai hills to the south.

Anaimudi rises to about 2,695 metres in the Anaimalai hills of Kerala, south of the Palakkad Gap, and it is the highest summit anywhere in the Peninsular Plateau and indeed in India south of the Himalayas.

Doddabetta, about 2,637 metres high, is the highest point of the Nilgiri hills, the block where the Western Ghats and the Eastern Ghats meet, and it overlooks the hill station of Udhagamandalam or Ooty in Tamil Nadu.

Gujarat has the longest coastline of any Indian state. Its shore runs from the Rann of Kachchh round the Gulf of Kachchh, along the whole Saurashtra or Kathiawar peninsula and down the Gulf of Khambhat, and this deeply indented outline gives it far more shore than any other state.

In methane the carbon atom is joined to four hydrogen atoms by four single bonds and has no lone pair, so the four bonding pairs push one another as far apart as possible and point to the corners of a regular tetrahedron, with bond angles of about 109.5 degrees.

Rusting is a slow oxidation in which iron combines with oxygen in the presence of moisture to form hydrated iron oxide, the reddish-brown flaky substance we call rust.

Zinc is above hydrogen in the reactivity series, so it displaces hydrogen from a dilute acid: zinc and dilute hydrochloric acid give zinc chloride and hydrogen gas.

A nitrogen atom has five valence electrons and needs three more to complete its octet, so two nitrogen atoms share three pairs of electrons and form a triple bond, written N to N with three lines.

In an ionic or electrovalent bond a metal atom loses one or more electrons to a non-metal atom; the metal becomes a positive ion and the non-metal a negative ion, and the electrostatic attraction between the two holds the compound together, as in sodium chloride and magnesium oxide.

Vegetable oils contain unsaturated fatty acids with carbon-carbon double bonds, and when hydrogen is passed through the oil at about 60 degrees Celsius in the presence of finely divided nickel, the double bonds add hydrogen and become saturated, turning the liquid oil into semi-solid vanaspati.