[Mission 2023] Current Affairs Quiz , 7 October 2022

Solution: a)

The prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace were established by the will of Alfred Nobel, a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite. The first awards were handed out in 1901, five years after Nobel’s death.

Each prize is worth 10 million kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be handed out with a diploma and gold medal on Dec. 10 — the date of Nobel’s death in 1896.

The Nobel statutes prohibit the judges from discussing their deliberations for 50 years. So it’s probably going to be a while before we know for sure how judges made their picks for 2022 and who was on their short lists.

Thousands of people around the world are eligible to submit nominations for the Nobel Prizes.

They include university professors, lawmakers, previous Nobel laureates and the committee members themselves.

The Nobel Peace Prize is presented in Norway while the other awards are handed out in Sweden. That’s how Alfred Nobel wanted it.

The following Indians (or individuals of Indian origin) have been honoured with the Nobel:

Rabindranath Tagore (Literature, 1913), C V Raman (Physics, 1930), Hargobind Khorana (Medicine, 1968), Mother Teresa (Peace, 1979), Subramanian Chandrashekhar (Physics, 1983), the Dalai Lama (Peace, 1989), Amartya Sen (Economics, 1998), Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (Chemistry, 2009), and Kailash Satyarthi (Peace, 2014), Abhijit Banerjee (Economics, 2019).

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Solution: c)

A team of researchers has flagged the changing chemistry of the western region of the Arctic Ocean after discovering acidity levels increasing three to four times faster than ocean waters elsewhere.

The team also identified a strong correlation between the accelerated rate of melting ice and the rate of ocean acidification. 

Scientists have predicted that by 2050, Arctic sea ice in this region will no longer survive the increasingly warm summers. As a result, the ocean’s chemistry will grow more acidic, creating life-threatening problems for the diverse population of sea creatures, plants and other living things that depend on a healthy ocean.

Seawater is normally alkaline, with a pH value of around 8.1.

They point to sea-ice melt as the key mechanism to explain this rapid pH decrease, because it changes surface water in three primary ways.

First, the water under the sea ice, which had a deficit of carbon dioxide, now is exposed to the atmospheric carbon dioxide and can take it up freely.
The seawater mixed with meltwater is light and can’t mix easily into deeper waters, which means the carbon dioxide is concentrated at the surface.

The meltwater dilutes the carbonate ion concentration in the seawater, weakening its ability to neutralise the carbon dioxide into bicarbonate and rapidly decreasing ocean pH.

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Solution: c)

The Chola kingdom stretched across present-day Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and parts of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. During the period of the Cholas’ rise and fall (around 9th to 12th century AD), other powerful dynasties of the region would also come and go, such as the Rashtrakutas of the Deccan who defeated the Cholas, and the Chalukyas of the Andhra Pradesh region whom the Cholas frequently battled.

The dynasty was founded by the king Vijaylaya.

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Solution: a)

The islands of the Arabian sea include Lakshadweep and Minicoy. These are scattered between 8°N-12°N and 71°E -74°E longitude. The entire group of islands is broadly divided by the Eleventh-degree channel, north of which is the Amini Island and to the south of the Canannore Island.

Suez Canal had been constructed in 1869 in Egypt between Port Said in the north and Port Suez in the south linking the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea.

Panama Canal connects the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west.

Solution: d)

The Government established Small Farmers’ Agri-Business Consortium (SFAC) as a Society in January 1994 to facilitate agri-business ventures by catalysing private investment through Venture Capital Assistance (VCA) Scheme in close association with financial institutions.

SFAC is an Autonomous Society promoted by Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Govt. of India”

It is registered under Societies Registration Act 1860. The role of State SFACs is to aggressively promote agribusiness project development in their respective States.

The main functions of SFAC are:

o Promotion of development of small agribusiness through VCA scheme.

o Helping formation and growth of Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) / Farmer Producer Companies (FPCs).

o Improving availability of working capital and development of business activities of FPOs/FPCs through Equity Grant and Credit Guarantee Fund Scheme.

o Implementation of National Agriculture Market (e-NAM) Electronic Trading platform.