UPSC GK Questions 2026

Dharmapala, the second and greatest ruler of the Pala dynasty of Bengal and Bihar, founded Vikramshila Vishwavidyalaya in the late eighth century at a site in present-day Bhagalpur district of Bihar.

The Chief Election Commissioner holds office for six years from the date he takes charge, or until he turns sixty-five, whichever comes first; the other Election Commissioners serve on the same terms.

Akbar introduced the mansabdari system in the closing years of the sixteenth century to grade every officer of the empire.

The Eighty-ninth Amendment Act, 2003 split the old joint commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes into two separate bodies.

Excavations at Lothal found graves in which a man and a woman were buried together in one pit, a custom archaeologists call couple or double burial.

When the government set longer term goals for the space programme in 2023, it named an Indian space station, the Bharatiya Antariksh Station, and an Indian crewed landing on the Moon.

Born at Karnal in Haryana, Kalpana Chawla studied aeronautical engineering, moved to the United States and joined NASA, flying first on the shuttle Columbia in 1997 as a mission specialist.

All Indian orbital launches, including the PSLV, GSLV and LVM3 flights, lift off from Sriharikota on the Andhra Pradesh coast, which has two operational launch pads.

China launched Yang Liwei aboard Shenzhou-5 in October 2003, becoming the third country after the Soviet Union and the United States to send a human into orbit on its own rocket and spacecraft.

The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth once aboard Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961, becoming the first human being in space.

Vyommitra, a name built from vyom for sky and mitra for friend, is a half-humanoid robot developed by ISRO to fly on an uncrewed Gaganyaan mission.

The Human Space Flight Centre, set up in 2019 as the ISRO centre responsible for the Gaganyaan programme, works from Bengaluru, which is also the location of the ISRO headquarters, the U R Rao Satellite Centre and the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network.

The crew module is the pressurised double walled cabin where the astronauts live, and it is the only part that returns to Earth, protected by a heat shield and lowered by parachutes.

TV-D1, the first test vehicle abort mission, was launched from Sriharikota on 21 October 2023.

Rakesh Sharma flew on Soyuz T-11, launched from Baikonur on 2 April 1984, and docked with the Soviet space station Salyut 7.

Rakesh Sharma, then a Squadron Leader in the Indian Air Force, became the first Indian in space on 3 April 1984.

Gaganyaan will fly on the LVM3, the heaviest Indian launch vehicle, modified and certified for carrying human beings and then written as HLVM3.

Pokhran lies in Jaisalmer district in the Thar desert and was the site of the underground nuclear test of 1974, code named Smiling Buddha, and of the series of tests in May 1998 carried out as Operation Shakti, after which India declared itself a nuclear weapon state.

Sawai Jai Singh II of the Kachhwaha house moved his seat from the hill fort of Amber to the plain and founded Jaipur in 1727.

The Makrana quarries in Nagaur district have produced white marble for centuries, and it is the marble used in the Taj Mahal at Agra and in the Victoria Memorial at Kolkata.