UPSC GK Questions 2026

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.

The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment met at Stockholm in June 1972 and was the first global gathering to treat the environment as a subject of international policy.

The Basel Convention was adopted in 1989 after public anger at the export of toxic waste from industrialised countries to poorer ones, and it requires prior informed consent from the importing state before such a shipment may be made.

The Paris Agreement was adopted at the twenty-first Conference of the Parties in 2015 and entered into force in 2016.

The Kyoto Protocol was adopted at the third Conference of the Parties to the framework convention on climate change, held at Kyoto in Japan in 1997.

It was agreed at Washington in 1973 and came into force in 1975.