UPSC GK Questions 2026

In the public sector the government owns the assets and provides the services, and the aim is public welfare rather than profit; in the private sector ownership rests with individuals or companies and profit is the motive.

An enterprise belongs to the organised sector when it is registered with the government and follows labour laws, so that employment is regular and secure and workers get fixed hours, paid leave, provident fund and medical benefits.

Banking and insurance create no physical product; they support production and trade by providing credit, moving money and covering risk, and such support activities are the core of the tertiary or service sector.

Agriculture and its allied activities still give work to the largest number of Indians, even though the sector's contribution to national income is far smaller than that share of employment would suggest.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, passed in 2005, guarantees one hundred days of wage employment in a financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work.

On a small family holding every member of the household may work on the land even though the work needs far fewer hands; if some of them were withdrawn, total output would not fall.

It produces no goods at all; it provides services such as transport, storage, communication, trade, banking, insurance, education, health care and administration, which is why it is commonly called the service sector.

Mining takes a product straight out of nature without changing its form, exactly as farming, fishing and forestry do, and every activity of that kind is placed in the primary sector.

The meridian of 82 degrees 30 minutes east passes near this town, and its local time is kept as Indian Standard Time across the whole country.

Every meridian runs from the North Pole to the South Pole, so all meridians are semicircles of the same length and all of them converge at the two poles.

Indian Standard Time is the local time of 82 degrees 30 minutes east. Multiplying 82.5 degrees by four minutes gives 330 minutes, that is five hours and thirty minutes, and since India lies east of Greenwich its clock is ahead by that much.

The circumference of the earth along a meridian is close to 40,000 kilometres, and dividing that by 360 degrees gives roughly 111 kilometres for one degree of latitude.

There are 90 parallels in the northern hemisphere, 90 in the southern hemisphere and the equator itself, which belongs to neither, making 181 in all.

The line does not follow it exactly: it bends east and west to keep the eastern tip of Siberia, the Aleutian Islands and several Pacific island groups on one side, so that no country is left with two dates at the same moment.

The Arctic Circle marks the latitude beyond which the sun stays above the horizon for the whole of at least one day in midsummer and below it for the whole of at least one day in midwinter, the phenomenon known as the midnight sun and the polar night.

The meridian running through it was accepted as the zero meridian, from which all longitudes are counted east and west, and its local time is Greenwich Mean Time, the reference for the world's standard times.

A great circle is one whose plane passes through the centre of the sphere and which therefore divides it into two equal halves.

The Tropic of Cancer passes through eight states, namely Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Tripura and Mizoram.

The earth completes one rotation of 360 degrees in 24 hours, that is 1,440 minutes, and dividing 1,440 by 360 gives four minutes for every degree of longitude.

This meridian passes near Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh and runs roughly through the middle of the country, so it was adopted as the standard meridian of India.