[Mission 2023] Current Affairs Quiz , 20 September 2022

Solution: d)

Colour revolutions refer to a series of uprisings that first began in former communist nations in Eastern Europe in the early 2000s, but are also used in reference to popular movements in the Middle East and Asia. Most have involved large-scale mobilisation on the streets, with demands for free elections or regime change, and calls for removal of authoritarian leaders.

Protesters often wear a specific colour, such as in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, but the term has also been used to describe movements named after flowers like the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia. In 2019, Beijing had said the protests in Hong Kong had taken on “colour revolution characteristics”.

Source

Solution: c)

In India, the native cheetah species was the Asiatic cheetah, which went extinct in 1952. Currently, only Iran has Asiatic cheetahs in the wild, numbering around 12, and the majority of the remaining 7,000-strong population of the big cats around the world is of African cheetahs – the ones that have now come to India.

According to the journal National Geographic, a popular theory on cheetahs’ evolution says they descended from the same ancestor as the American puma, another big cat. This implies cheetahs were not limited to two continents at that point. “About 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, around the end of the last ice age, an extinction event took place that wiped out many large mammal species around the world, including the wild cheetahs of North America and Europe. The extinction of these early cheetah species left only the Asian and African populations of cheetahs”, it says.

Solution: b)

Rabies is a zoonotic disease (a disease that is transmitted from animals to humans), caused by the rabies virus, of the Lyssavirus genus, within the family Rhabdoviridae. Domestic dogs are the most common reservoir of the virus, with more than 99% of human deaths caused by dog-mediated rabies.

Rabies is a 100% vaccine-preventable disease. Countries embarking on rabies elimination programmes have successfully experienced marked reductions, often progressing to the elimination of rabies. Elimination programs often revolve around mass dog vaccination campaigns, where at least 70% of the dog population should be covered in order to break the cycle of transmission in dogs, and to humans.

With the exception of Antarctica, rabies is endemic on all continents. Of the tens of thousands of deaths occurring annually due to rabies, 95% of cases are reported in Asia and Africa.

Solution: a)

Black carbon (BC) is the result of incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, biofuel, and biomass. It consists of elemental carbon in several forms. Black carbon warms the atmosphere due to its absorption and by reducing albedo when deposited on snow and ice.

It is directly emitted in the atmosphere as fine particles PM5. It is highly effective in absorbing solar energy and can absorb million times more energy than Carbon Dioxide.

Life time of black carbon in the atmosphere is only a few days to weeks, compared to CO2 which has an atmospheric lifetime of more than 100 years.

Solution: d)

Retrovirus is a type of virus that uses RNA as its genetic material. After infecting a cell, a retrovirus uses an enzyme called reverse transcriptase to convert its RNA into DNA. The retrovirus then integrates its viral DNA into the DNA of the host cell, which allows the retrovirus to replicate. HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is a retrovirus.

Antiretroviral drugs are medications for the treatment of infection by retroviruses, primarily HIV.

Different classes of antiretroviral drugs act at different stages of the HIV life cycle.