[Mission 2024] Current Affairs Quiz , 16 November 2023

Solution: d)

India’s foreign exchange (Forex) reserves stand at around $578 billion. It is acquired by the RBI for the following reasons:

1. To defend the rupee when needed
2. To gain external account security
3. To enable country to globalise further
4. To import essentials for economic and social security
5. To deter speculations
6. To enjoy favourable rating by sovereign credit rating agencies.

Solution: b)

Statement 3 is incorrect.

Panthera:

This is the genus of large wild cats that can roar. Among them, the lion, the leopard, and the jaguar are more closely related, while the other strand has the tiger and the snow leopard. The snow leopard is an exception to the rest of the group in that it can’t roar.

Tiger is the largest of all wild cats and also the earliest Panthera member to exist. Primarily a forest animal, they range from the Siberian taiga to the Sunderban delta. The national animal of India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and South Korea, the tiger was voted the world’s favourite animal ahead of the dog in a 2004 Animal Planet global online poll.

Solution: a)

Only Statement 3 is correct.

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) recently released the Landslide Atlas of India, a detailed guide identifying landslide hotspots in the country.

Landslides are natural disasters occurring mainly in mountainous terrains where there are conducive conditions of soil, rock, geology and slope. A sudden movement of rock, boulders, earth or debris down a slope is termed as a landslide. Natural causes that trigger it include heavy rainfall, earthquakes, snowmelting and undercutting of slopes due to flooding.

Landslides can also be caused by anthropogenic activities such as excavation, cutting of hills and trees, excessive infrastructure development, and overgrazing by cattle.

Landslides are broadly classified based on the type of materials involved (rock, debris, soil, loose mud), type of movement of the material (fall, topple, slide, rotational slide or translational slide), and type of flow of the material. Another category is of landslides that spread laterally.

ISRO’s National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Hyderabad, has created a database of landslide-prone regions of India based on events during 1998 – 2022, primarily along the Himalayas and the Western Ghats. In addition to aerial images, high resolution satellite images captured using cameras Indian Remote Sensing (IRS-1D) PAN + LISS-III, satellites ResourceSat-1 and 2, etc., were used to study the landslides over the past 25 years. 

Solution: c)

The Health Ministry’s unique “adopt a TB-patient” (Ni-kshay Mitras) initiative — probably the only one-of-its-kind in the world.

The programme was brought in to fill the critical “community’’ elements into India’s fight towards the Pradhan Mantri TB Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan aimed at eliminating TB by 2025.

Ni-kshay Mitra (Donor) for this programme includes co-operative societies, corporates, elected representatives, individuals, institutions, non-governmental organisations, political parties and partners who can support by adopting the health facilities (for individual donor), blocks/urban wards/districts/States for accelerating the response against TB to complement the government efforts, as per the district-specific requirements in coordination with the district administration.

Free diagnostics, free drugs and Ni-kshay Poshan Yojana provided by the National TB Elimination Programme (NTEP) to all the TB patients notified from both the public and the private sector.

Solution: a)

CRISPR is short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, which is a reference to the clustered and repetitive sequences of DNA found in bacteria, whose natural mechanism to fight some viral diseases is replicated in this gene-editing tool.

It is simple, and still far more accurate — and it does not involve the introduction of any new gene from the outside. A bad stretch in the DNA sequence, which is the cause of disease or disorder, is located, cut, and removed — and then replaced with a ‘correct’ sequence. And the tools used to achieve this are not mechanical, but biochemical — specific protein and RNA molecules.

The technology replicates a natural defence mechanism in some bacteria that uses a similar method to protect itself from virus attacks.

The first task is to identify the particular sequence of genes that is the cause of the trouble. Once that is done, an RNA molecule is programmed to locate this sequence on the DNA strand, just like the ‘find’ or ‘search’ function on a computer. After this, a special protein called Cas9, which is often described as ‘genetic scissors’, is used to break the DNA strand at specific points, and remove the bad sequence.

A DNA strand, when broken, has a natural tendency to re-attach and heal itself. But if the auto-repair mechanism is allowed to continue, the bad sequence can regrow. So, scientists intervene during the auto-repair process by supplying the correct sequence of genetic codes, which attaches to the broken DNA strand.