[Mission 2024] Current Affairs Quiz , 1 December 2023

Solution: b)

Statement 2 is incorrect.

CDSL, or Central Depositories Services India Ltd, is a government-registered share depository, alongside its other state-owned counterpart National Securities Depository Ltd (NSDL).

Share depositories hold shares in an electronic or dematerialised form and are an enabler for securities transactions, playing a somewhat similar role to what banks play in handling cash and fixed deposits. While banks help customers keep their cash in electronic form, share depositories help consumers store shares in a dematerialised form.

CDSL was founded in 1999. It is a Market Infrastructure Institution or MII that is deemed as a crucial part of the capital market structure, providing services to all market participants, including exchanges, clearing corporations, depository participants, issuers and investors.

Solution: b)

Statement 3 is incorrect.

Emissions from livestock mainly include carbon dioxide (from urea), nitrous oxide (from livestock dung and urine), and methane (from belching) among others. They contribute towards the greenhouse effect as due to these gases, heat gets trapped around the surface of the earth and causes global warming.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of gases is a metric that helps measure “the radiative effect (determined by the ability to absorb energy) of each unit of gas” over a specific period of time such as 100 years, “as expressed relative to the radiative effect of carbon dioxide.”

Through GWP, we know gases such as nitrous oxide and methane produce more heat around the earth’s surface than carbon dioxide or CO2, which is taken as a reference. It absorbs more energy than CO2 but stays in the atmosphere for a shorter duration. Over a 20-year-period, it has 80 times more GWP than that carbon dioxide, according to the UNEP website.

Solution: c)

A total lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth casts its shadow completely over a full moon, blocking reflection of all direct sunlight from the lunar orb and dimming the color of the moon to a reddish hue, hence the term “blood moon.”

This is only possible when the orbits of the Earth, moon and sun align so that the moon is directly behind Earth relative to the sun. Otherwise, the moon passes above or below Earth’s shadow because its orbit around Earth is usually tilted relative to Earth’s orbit about the sun.

The reddish appearance of the lunar surface — the moon does not entirely disappear from view — is caused by rays of sunlight around the outer edge of the eclipse shadow, or umbra, being filtered and refracted as it passes through Earth’s atmosphere, bathing the moon indirectly in a dim copper glow.

The degree of redness depends on atmospheric conditions that vary with levels of air pollution, dust storms, wildfire smoke and even volcanic ash.

Total lunar eclipses occur, on average, about once every year and a half, according to NASA. But the interval varies.

Solution: b)

Statement 1 is incorrect.

The National Food Security Act (NFSA) 2013 expanded the coverage of the PDS substantially.

The law mandates that 50% of the urban and 75% of the rural populations must be covered by the PDS. 

The NFSA requires that the latest completed Census be used to calculate the total PDS coverage. 

Some States use their own budgets to “top up” PDS coverage through the Open Market Sale Scheme (OMSS) — for example, Tamil Nadu — or local procurement — for example, Odisha and Chhattisgarh.

Solution: b)

Statement 2 is incorrect.

Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe.

Scientists say that the reason we are unable to see or detect this invisible matter is that it does not interact with electromagnetic forces — things like visible light, X-ray or radio waves.

They argue that we can, however, observe some of the effects of dark matter through its gravitational force.

But we still want to detect dark matter in its own right. And here’s where CERN’s Large Hadron Collider comes in.