UPSC GK Questions 2026

. A simple astronomical (refracting) telescope uses two convex, that is convergent, lenses.

A wind gap has nothing to do with wind, despite its name. It is a notch or gap in a ridge through which a river once flowed; when that river's headwaters were captured by another stream, the gap was left dry.

The rand is the official currency of South Africa, and ZAR is its international code, taken from the Dutch name Zuid-Afrikaanse Rand.

. An Exchange-Traded Fund holds a basket of assets, such as the shares of an index, gold or bonds, and its units are listed and traded on a stock exchange like a share.

Milton Friedman put forward the natural rate of unemployment in his presidential address to the American Economic Association in 1967, published in 1968; Edmund Phelps reached a similar idea independently.

Functional group isomers have the same molecular formula but different functional groups. Alkyl halides such as C2H5Cl can only contain the halogen group, so no other functional group can be built from the same formula; they show chain and position isomerism instead.

Helicobacter pylori is a spiral-shaped bacterium that lives in the lining of the stomach. It survives the strong acid by producing the enzyme urease, which makes ammonia around it, and it inflames and weakens the protective mucus layer, so acid can damage the wall and cause a peptic ulcer.

Cardiac muscle, found only in the wall of the heart, is made of cylindrical cells that branch and join with one another, and each cell usually has one central nucleus.

Panchmuli Lake lies in the Sardar Sarovar reservoir area on the Narmada at Ekta Nagar (Kevadia) in the Narmada district of Gujarat, close to the Statue of Unity, and is known for its boat rides and crocodiles.

Kashmir Shaivism, a non-dual (Advaita) school of Shaiva philosophy, is traced to the sage Vasugupta, who lived in Kashmir around the late 8th or early 9th century CE.

Under Article 270 of the Constitution, the taxes levied and collected by the Union, such as income tax, corporation tax, Union excise duties and the central GST, form a divisible pool that is shared with the States on the recommendation of the Finance Commission.

The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in December 1997 at Kyoto in Japan under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and came into force in February 2005.

. For a stone whirled in a circle, the string pulls it towards the centre, while the stone moves along the circle, tangent to it at every instant.

The Technology Development Fund was set up by the Ministry of Defence in 2016 and is run by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) as part of the Make in India drive.

The Vice-President said he was satisfied that negotiations on India's association with it had been concluded, and he mentioned this while speaking of cooperation in technology, research and innovation.

The Vice-President used this phrase for the proposed Free Trade Agreement between India and the European Union, expressed the hope that it would be signed within this year, and asked the visiting members for the support of the European Parliament in bringing it to completion.

Its delegation, led by Mr David McAllister, was received by the Vice-President and Rajya Sabha Chairman at Parliament House in New Delhi, and the talk ranged over trade, technology, research and the broader partnership between India and the European Union.

Punatsangchhu-I is the project of that size, and the two ministers noted that dam work there has moved steadily since concreting resumed in April 2026.

Four bilateral meetings were held on the margins of the week, and Japan was not among them.

This was the installed electricity capacity of the country as on 30 September 2026, and of it about 308 GW, or roughly 55 per cent, came from non-fossil sources.