UPSC GK Questions 2026

Primary deficit equals fiscal deficit minus interest payments. Interest is the cost of borrowings made in earlier years, so removing it leaves the borrowing that the present year's policies alone make necessary.

Fiscal deficit is total expenditure minus total receipts other than borrowings, which means it measures exactly how much the government must borrow during the year to meet its planned spending.

The Constitution nowhere uses the word budget. Article 112 requires the President to cause to be laid before both Houses of Parliament, in respect of every financial year, a statement of the estimated receipts and expenditure of the Government of India, and this statement is called the Annual Financial Statement.

The Union Budget 2021-22 proposed raising the corpus of the Contingency Fund of India from five hundred crore rupees to thirty thousand crore rupees, and the change was carried through the Finance Bill of that year.

The budget estimate for the fiscal deficit of the central government in 2021-22 was placed at 6.8 per cent of gross domestic product.

It was the first union budget in India not to be printed.

A receipt is capital if it either creates a liability for the government or reduces an asset it holds.

The continental shelf is the gently sloping submerged edge of a continent, usually taken down to about two hundred metres.

Its southern end holds the Challenger Deep, the deepest surveyed point on earth at roughly eleven kilometres below sea level, deep enough to swallow Mount Everest with water to spare.

Sodium chloride makes up most of it, with magnesium, calcium and potassium salts making up the rest. Salinity varies with evaporation, rainfall, river inflow and the melting or freezing of ice, so the figure is an average rather than a fixed value.

The warm Gulf Stream moving north-east meets the cold Labrador current coming south past Newfoundland. Nutrients carried by the cold water mix with the warmer surface layer, plankton multiplies, and huge shoals of cod once gathered there.

It flows northward along the western coast of southern Africa, carrying cool water from the Southern Ocean towards the equator, and the upwelling along it makes the Namibian coast a rich fishing zone while helping to keep the Namib desert dry.

The bay narrows and shallows inland, so the incoming tidal wave is funnelled into a smaller and smaller cross-section and its height is greatly magnified, giving the greatest difference between high and low water anywhere on earth.

Spring tides occur at new moon and at full moon, when the sun, the earth and the moon lie in a straight line, a position called syzygy.

Textbooks describing the distribution of water on earth give about 97.2 per cent as ocean water, roughly 2 per cent locked in ice caps and glaciers, and well under 1 per cent as groundwater, lakes, rivers, soil moisture and water vapour together.

The Ring of Fire is a horseshoe-shaped belt running around the rim of the Pacific Ocean, from the Andes up the west coast of the Americas, across the Aleutians and down through Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia to New Zealand.

El Nino, Spanish for the child, is the warm surface water that appears off the coast of Peru and Ecuador around Christmas in some years, replacing the normally cold Peru or Humboldt current.

It is a warm current of the Indian Ocean that flows southward along the eastern coast of southern Africa, carrying tropical water towards the Cape before most of it turns back into the Indian Ocean.

The Minamata Convention on Mercury was adopted in 2013 and entered into force in 2017. It controls the supply and trade of mercury, restricts its use in products such as batteries, switches and certain measuring devices, and regulates emissions from coal burning and from small-scale gold mining.

The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, adopted in 2000, governs the safe handling, transport and use of living modified organisms produced by modern biotechnology.