QUIZ – 2017: Insights Current Affairs Quiz, 19 & 20 March 2017

Solution: a.

Tripitaka or Three Baskets is a traditional term used for various Buddhist scriptures. It is known as Pali Canon in English. The three pitakas are Sutta Pitaka, Vinaya Pitaka and Abhidhamma Pitaka.

GKtoday;

In the news: Publication of Tripitaka in Devanagari script – PIB;

Solution: c.

• A question on Al Nagah-II exercises was posted here on March 1^st. It is a military exercise with Oman.
• Pay attention to the fact that military exercises usually have different names when carried out by different armed services of the forces. An example: The Indian Navy’s exercise with Singapore’s is termed ‘SIMBEX’, but the Army exercise between the two nations is termed ‘Bold Kurukshetra’.

Source and improvisation: TH: Bilateral exercises give fresh push to India’s strategic ties;

Solution: d.

The tunnel, which is located at an elevation of 1,200 metre, will be the first in India to be equipped with the world-class integrated tunnel control system, through which ventilation, fire control, signals, communication and electrical systems will be automatically actuated. The tunnel will reduce the travel time between Jammu and Srinagar by two-and-a-half hours. The road distance from Chenani and Nashri will now be 10.9 km, instead of the present 41 km, officials said.

TH: India’s longest road tunnel all set to ease travel in Jammu and Kashmir;

Solution: c.

A GK question (could be of use for the main examination).

• Legislation dating to the late 1990s mandates that every household must segregate waste. There is a vertiginous array of categories to sort into.
• Households must put out their trash for collection in local authority-designated clear bags. If the trash is sorted incorrectly, it is simply not collected. Instead, a large, red sticker explaining the error is put on the bags, leaving the miscreant crushed under the weight of neighbourhood social shame.
• Toyota and other carmakers are designing cars that are made almost completely of recyclable materials. Tokyo’s Haneda Airport is built on an artificial island made of garbage.
• Tokyo will host the 2020 Games, and from next month, collection boxes are going up all over the city for residents to donate old mobile phones, computers and small household appliances. The idea is to collect enough metal to make all 5,000 Olympic and Paralympic medals with recycled materials.

TH: A touch of recycling, Japanese style;

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Solution: a.

UNESCO Tentative list: Chilika lake;

Improvisation: TH: Converts to the birdsong;

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Solution: a.

• “As of 2008, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh in flood plain of Ganga River; Assam and Manipur in flood plain of Brahamaputra and Imphal rivers, and Rajnandgaon village in Chhattisgarh state have so far been exposed to drinking arsenic contaminated hand tube-wells water.”
• Arsenic contamination is largely geogenic in nature (a result of geological processes) but it is also partly a result of anthropogenic activities like intense exploitation of groundwater, application of fertilisers, burning of coal.
• As per Bengal, followed by Bihar and then Assam occupy the top three spots with respect to the number of arsenic-affected persons.

Source: CGWB Document (no need to read it; we are just providing the source);

Improvisation: TH: 1.04 crore hit by As contamination in Bengal;

Solution: d.

“On March 14, news agencies across the world reported the discovery of a group of fossils of a 1.6-billion-year-old red algae, a precursor to plant and animal life, from Chitrakoot in Uttar Pradesh… What has been eclipsed in the announcement is that one set of these fossils are called Rafatazmia chitrakootensis, named after Rafat Jamal Azmi, a Dehradun-based geologist at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, who was the first to report these unique fossils over two decades ago.”

TH: 1.6 billion year old fossil puts life into Indian geologist’s theories;

Solution: b.

• A judge of a high court can be removed from his office by an order of the President.
• The President can issue the removal order only after an address by the Parliament has been presented to him in the same session for such removal.
• The address must be supported by a special majority of each House of Parliament (i.e., a majority of the total membership of that House and majority of not less than two-thirds of the members of that House present and voting). The grounds of removal are two—proved misbehaviour or incapacity. Thus, a judge of a high court can be removed in the same manner and on the same grounds as a judge of the Supreme Court.

In the news (improvisation): Justice C.S. Karnan;

Solution: d.

All statements are correct. Read this Th article to get an idea of how the new plan is different from its predecessor.

Solution: a.

TH: When Mohammed Anis refused to leave his home in Syria;

Solution: c.

• GRAPES-3 (Gamma Ray Astronomy PeV EnergieS phase-3) is designed to study cosmic rays with an array of air shower detectors and a large area muon detector (muons are a type of cosmic ray).
• The GRAPES-3 experiment located at Ooty in India started as a collaboration of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India and the Osaka City University, Osaka, Japan. At present many institutions from India and Japan are in collaboration.
• In the news: The GRAPES-3 experiment at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research’s Cosmic Ray Laboratory in Ooty is getting upgraded. The telescope made news last year when it detected the effect of a solar storm that hit the earth in June 2015. The upgrade will play a major role in getting precise information about the propagation of storms in ‘the last million miles’ (from the L-1 point) of their journey from the Sun to the earth.
• The upgraded detector will have an increased coverage of the sky and improved capacity to determine the direction of incident cosmic rays. The latter property, of being able to discern the direction of detected particles, makes it unique among cosmic ray detectors in the world; it can also to measure the intensity of the particles.

TH: Telescope upgrade to sniff out solar storms;

Solution: a.

• With the first day of spring around the corner, temperatures start to rise, ice melts away, and the world around us starts to blossom. Scientists refer to this transition from winter to the growing season as the “vernal window”, and a new study led by the University of New Hampshire, U.S., shows this window may be getting longer.
• Research shows that the extent of snow cover over the Northern Hemisphere has declined significantly in the past 30 years. Climate change is altering the timing and duration of the vernal window.

TH: What is a ‘vernal window’?;

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Solution: c.

“Assam Government will be hosting the biggest river festival ‘Namami Brahmaputra’ planned all along the mighty river with the main venue being a river island at Guwahati. The five-day festival is to be held from March 31 to April 4 where the Assam Government led by its Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal and his team has planned out a host of activities to showcase the region’s art, heritage and culture.”

March 1^st: TH;

TH: China to take part in Namami Brahmaputra;

Solution: d.

• Statement 1&2: The wireless data comes from a few central ‘light antennas’, for instance mounted on the ceiling, which are able to very precisely direct the rays of light supplied by an optical fiber.
• Since there are no moving parts, it is maintenance-free and needs no power: the antennas contain a pair of gratings that radiate light rays of different wavelengths at different angles (‘passive diffraction gratings’). Changing the light wavelengths also changes the direction of the ray of light. Since a safe infrared wavelength is used that does not reach the vulnerable retina in your eye, this technique is harmless.
• Statement 3: Li-fi can deliver internet access 100 times faster than traditional wi-fi, offering speeds of up to 1Gbps (gigabit per second). On the other hand, the capacity of the Infrared-based Wi-Fi is not only huge (more than 40Gbps per ray) but also there is no need to share since every device gets its own ray of light. The average connection speed in the Netherlands is two thousand times less than the speed offered by this system..
• Additional Information: If you walk around and your device moves out of the light antenna’s line of sight, then another light antenna takes over. The network tracks the precise location of every wireless device using its radio signal transmitted in the return direction. It is a simple matter to add devices: they are assigned different wavelengths by the same light antenna and so do not have to share capacity.

Primary Source: Science Daily;

TH: New wi-fi system to offer super-fast connectivity;

Solution: d.

• The technique involves extracting ‘mahi’ using cow urine from a cocktail of fruit pulp and tree bark such as haritaki, amla, bibhitakhi or bhomora, mango and jamun — often infused with the blood of eels or catfish. Rust from iron tools or nails was added for an intense black hue.
• ‘Mahi’ was used in early and medieval Assam for writing on ‘sancipat’ (folios made of the bark of the sanci tree) manuscripts. Some folios were gifted by Kumar Bhaskar Barman, the then King of Pragjyotishpura (ancient Assam) to Harshavardhana, an emperor who ruled north India from 606 to 647 C.E., a testimony to the period of use.
• The endurance of the ink is proven by the stability of sancipat manuscripts. The key factor for this long-lasting marriage between ‘mahi’ and ‘sancipat’ is the herbal concoction’s resistance to aerial oxidation and fungal attacks. In contrast, some formulations of acidic iron gall ink — which was in use at the same time in Europe — can render documents illegible by causing loss of text, bleeding and fading due to ink corrosion. No external stabiliser is used in making Mahi, whereas gum Arabic is used for the purpose in iron gall ink.
• Another interesting feature is that the pH of mahi remains neutral because of cow urine and the absence of acidic ingredients like vinegar. Iron gall ink has an acidic character that leads to destruction of the manuscript.
• Though there are several recorded recipes for ‘mahi’ formulation, one commonality exists for all: the season during which it is concocted. It is only prepared (in natural settings) in the winter season. The low temperature and dry conditions in winter ensure minimum exposure of the mixture to microbes and heat, which may decompose the dyes during the long time needed for extraction.

TH: Reviving Assam’s ancient ink;

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