UPSC GK Questions 2026

Shaunak is the Indian Coast Guard ship that left Chennai on 25 September 2026 for Perth in Australia as India's contribution to the QUAD-at-Sea Ship Observer Mission, carrying six Sea Riders drawn from the four QUAD countries.

Ways and Means Advances is the facility through which the Reserve Bank of India lets the Centre bridge short-lived mismatches between money received and money paid out, and for the second half of FY 2026-27 the ceiling on this facility has been set at Rs 50,000 crore.

The gross borrowing of Rs 7,86,000 crore planned for the second half of FY 2026-27 will be completed through 23 weekly auctions of dated securities, with the paper spread over eight maturity buckets ranging from three years to fifty years.

The Finance Ministry, after consulting the Reserve Bank of India, settled on this gross market borrowing figure for the closing half of FY 2026-27, and the whole sum is to be raised through 23 weekly auctions of dated securities.

The Hundred Years' War was fought between England and France from 1337 to 1453, so it actually ran for 116 years with long truces in between.

Chandragupta II extended Gupta rule to Gujarat around 390 AD by defeating the Western Kshatrapas, the Saka rulers of Malwa, Gujarat and Kathiawar.

Nor'westers are violent pre-monsoon thunderstorms that strike eastern India, especially West Bengal and Assam, in the afternoons and evenings of April and May.

Triratna means the three jewels in which a Buddhist takes refuge. Buddha is the enlightened teacher, Dhamma is his teaching of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, and Sangha is the order of monks and nuns that carries the teaching forward.

The Boston Tea Party took place on 16 December 1773, when American colonists threw British tea into Boston harbour. The protest was against the Tea Act of 1773, which let the East India Company sell tea in the colonies without paying the usual duties and undercut local merchants.

Members of the board were told about forthcoming reforms, and among them was this bill, which is proposed to take effect from the first day of that year and is aimed at making life easier for consumers and for those who deal with them.

The chairman of the board cited the Jan Vishwas Act as a reform that has rationalised that many compliances, and placed it alongside the ease of doing business measures and the creation of state level traders' welfare boards as the main steps taken for the trading community.

The board functions under the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade of that ministry, so its meeting place follows naturally.

When the team averaged their measurements over all directions around the galaxies they picked up no signal, but when they probed along the direction of the jet they found a strong one, which showed that the jet illuminates only the gas in its path.

The lead author of the paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, is Namrata Roy, an assistant professor in the astronomy and astrophysics division of that institute, and a co-author quoted on the finding is Sanchayeeta Borthakur of the American university.

The study describes the circumgalactic medium as a diffuse, ghostly reservoir of gas that lies past the edge of the stellar disc and spreads out to between ten and twenty times the size of the galaxy, and this reservoir supplies the fuel from which stars are eventually made.

The Vice-President offered these three ideas as the philosophy behind the programme while urging countries of the Global South to respond together to challenges that cut across technology, cyberspace, artificial intelligence, energy and maritime security, climate change and supply chains.

The programme is put together by the two ministries along with that secretariat, and it is conducted in association with the National Defence College, which is where such strategic courses are run.

The fourth edition of the International Strategic Engagement Programme has 38 delegates in all, and of these 25 are international delegates who have come from 22 countries, among them Sri Lanka, Seychelles, Mongolia, Nepal, Mauritius, Maldives, Oman, Guyana, Chile, Argentina, the Philippines, Thailand, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, Myanmar, Uzbekistan and Brazil.

The Department of Pharmaceuticals sits in that ministry and runs all three schemes, the one for bulk drugs, the one for pharmaceuticals and the one for medical devices.

Production of 57 unique medical devices has begun under the scheme, and the list runs from magnetic resonance imaging machines, computed tomography scanners, cath labs and linear accelerators to C-arms, mammography machines, ultrasound systems, anaesthesia machines and heart valves, most of which were earlier brought in from outside.