UPSC GK Questions 2026

On 19 July 1969 the government nationalised fourteen of the largest commercial banks in the country, the aim being to take banking to rural areas, direct credit to agriculture and small industry, and end the concentration of bank funds in a few business houses.

In a repurchase or repo transaction a bank sells government paper to the Reserve Bank and agrees to buy it back shortly afterwards at a slightly higher price; the difference works out as interest at the repo rate.

M3 is M1 plus time deposits with banks, and it is called broad money or the aggregate monetary resource. It is the measure the Reserve Bank follows most closely because it captures both spendable balances and funds held for a fixed term.

The Reserve Bank of India was constituted under the Reserve Bank of India Act of 1934, on the recommendation of the Hilton Young Commission, and started functioning on 1 April 1935 with its central office at Calcutta, which was shifted permanently to Bombay in 1937.

Basic lava is poor in silica, very hot and thin, so it travels a long way from the vent before it solidifies.

The circum-Pacific belt, popularly called the Ring of Fire, runs from the Andes of South America up through Mexico, the western coast of North America and the Aleutians, then down through Kamchatka, Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia to New Zealand.

P waves are longitudinal, moving the particles of the medium back and forth along the direction of travel by compression and rarefaction.

Stromboli is a small island volcano in the Lipari or Aeolian group north of Sicily, and it has been in almost continuous mild eruption for centuries.

Mount Vesuvius stands near the Bay of Naples in southern Italy and its eruption in 79 CE buried the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum under ash, preserving them so well that they became an archaeological record of Roman daily life.

A seismograph carries a mass that stays nearly still while the ground and the frame move under it, and the relative motion is traced as a wavy line.

Barren Island lies in the Andaman Sea, to the east of the main Andaman group, and is the only active volcano in India and in South Asia.

The Richter scale, devised by Charles F. Richter in 1935, expresses the energy released at the source of the shock.

The focus, also called the hypocentre, is the point below the surface at which the strained rock ruptures and releases its stored elastic energy as seismic waves.

Secondary or S waves are transverse, so the particles of the medium move at right angles to the direction of travel.

Sambhar Lake lies west of Jaipur in Rajasthan, has no outlet to the sea and loses water only by evaporation, so salts brought in by seasonal streams accumulate in it.

The Montreux Record names sites already on the Ramsar list where the ecological character has changed, is changing or is likely to change because of pollution, drainage, encroachment or other human interference.

Designated in 2008 in Gujarat, it covers the largest area of any biosphere reserve in India, taking in the marine national park and sanctuary of the gulf together with its islands, coral reefs, mangroves and mudflats, which support corals, dugongs, dolphins and large numbers of migratory shorebirds.

The core zone is the innermost and the only strictly protected part of a biosphere reserve, usually already notified as a national park or a wildlife sanctuary.

Both were placed on the Ramsar list in 1981 and were the first Indian wetlands to be so recognised.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization launched the Man and the Biosphere Programme in 1971 as an intergovernmental scientific programme to improve the relationship between people and their environment, and the sites recognised under it form the World Network of Biosphere Reserves.