Daily Current Affairs MCQ / UPSC / IAS / 17-11-19 | Free PDF

MCQ 1

1. Under flagship Jal Jeevan Mission, the Centre aims to provide safe piped water to all households by 2022
2. Mumbai is the only city where all samples of tap water met all the tested parameters under the Indian Standard 10500:2012 (specification for drinking water) so far.

Choose correct

(A) Only 1
(B) Only 2
(C) Both
(D) None

 Delhi has the most unsafe tap water Only Mumbai meets BIS standards

• If it wasn’t enough that Delhi air is among the world’s most polluted, a new study has now shown that the city’s tap water is the most unsafe among 21 State capitals.
• The national capital is at the very bottom of the list, in a ranking based on tap water quality released by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) on Tuesday.
• It is among 13 cities where all tested samples failed to meet the BIS norms for piped drinking water, including Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Jaipur and Lucknow.
• In fact, Mumbai is the only city where all samples of tap water met all the tested parameters under the Indian Standard 10500:2012 (specification for drinking water) so far.
• Under its flagship Jal Jeevan Mission, the Centre aims to provide safe piped water to all households by 2024, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi promising to spend over ₹3.5 lakh crore on the scheme in his last Independence Day speech.
• However, the study, conducted by the BIS for the Union Food and Consumer Affairs Ministry, showed that even in urban areas, which are connected to the piped water network, there is no guarantee that the water is safe for consumption.
• While it is mandatory for bottled water manufacturers to meet quality standards, the BIS standard is voluntary for the public agencies which supply and distribute piped water.
• The Ministry is writing to all State governments to develop a consensus on making the standard mandatory.
• The BIS standard involves 48 different parameters. Samples are being tested under 28 parameters so far, leaving out parameters related to radioactive substances and free residual chlorine.
• Samples are undergoing physical and organoleptic tests (which identify odour, turbidity and pH levels), as well as chemical tests and virological, bacteriological and biological tests (which identify harmful organisms and disease carriers).
• So far, only Delhi samples have been tested under the final category and have come out clean in that area. The capital’s samples also conformed with parameters for toxic substances and pesticide residue. However, coliform and E.Coli samples were found in all Delhi samples, along with excess metals such as aluminium, manganese, magnesium, ammonia and iron.

 MCQ 2

1. Diabetes & Tb, in both India is at 2nd position for no. of patients in the world after China
2. The World Health Organization has aimed at eliminating TB by 2030 with SDGs

 Choose correct

(A) Only 1
(B) Only 2
(C) Both
(D) None

• Accounting for over a million deaths in 2018, tuberculosis (TB) remains a major healthcare burden for most developing countries, and India still leads the list with the largest number of cases.
• “The World Health Organization has aimed at eliminating TB by 2035, and the Indian government has vouched to do this by 2025. If this ambitious plan has to succeed, we should be concentrating on not missing out on any case,” says Dr. Sayed E. Hasnain from Jamia Hamdard University in New Delhi.
• With this aim in mind, he and his collaborators have developed a small device that can be attached to a simple optical microscope to convert it into a fluorescence microscope, thus enabling better TB diagnosis at the point-of-care.

Battery-operated device

• Named SeeTB, the device is battery operated and allows quick identification of the bacteria. The team has also developed a clearing reagent called CLR which helps in thinning the collected sputum thus enhancing the bacteria detection. A patent has been filed for both the reagent and the device.
• “CLR-SeeTB is a highly economical platform and is most suited for a country like India which has a high TB burden,” adds Dr. Nasreen Z Ehtesham, Director-in-Charge at the Indian Council of Medical Research–National Institute of Pathology and one of the authors of the paper published in Scientific Reports.
• “Also, the currently used fluorescence microscopy requires infrastructure, an air-conditioned room, trained professionals and is functional only in tertiary health care centers. SeeTB can be used at the primary health care centres in the villages, and once diagnosed, the treatment can be started.”
•  The device was used to test more than 300 suspected pulmonary patients. The results showed that compared to fluorescence microscopy, the CLR-SeeTB system had higher sensitivity.

 Relative performance

• Against bacterial culture studies, fluorescence microscopy showed 63.38% sensitivity while SeeTB system showed improved sensitivity of 76.05%.
• When the performance was compared against GeneXpert, another diagnosis tool that looks for DNA markers of TB bacteria, SeeTB showed improved sensitivity. Also, while GeneXpert method takes about two hours, SeeTB can help find the bacteria in about 30 minutes.

3D printing

• Dr. Ravikrishnan Elangovan from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and one of the team members explains: “We used 3D printing to rapidly prototype this compact optical platform, and now we are using injection moulding to produce these components in large scale. This can help drastically bring down the cost, thus making it feasible for large scale distributions across the country.”
• The Indian Council of Medical Research has planned to start large scale validation of the CLR-SeeTB in its primary health research units at different locations in the country.

 MCQ 3

 NISHTHA mission is related to

1. Capacity building of school students
2. Skill development of weavers
3. Law and order in states
4. None

• NISHTHA- National Initiative for School Heads’ and Teachers’ Holistic Advancement (NISHTHA) has been launched in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir.

Key features of the scheme:

• It is a Mission aimed at improving learning outcomes at Elementary level through integrated Teacher Trainings.
• This Mission aims to build the capacities of 42 lakh participants covering all teachers and Heads of Schools at elementary level in all Government Schools across the country, faculty members of SIEs/SCERTs, DIETs etc.

 MCQ 4

1. Sun’s surface layer, corona has around 15 million degree celsius, temp.
2. 1.6-metre Goode Solar Telescope at the Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO), is the world’s largest solar telescope

 Choose correct

(A) Only 1
 (B) Only 2
(C) Both
(D) None

• The Sun is one of the most familiar celestial objects – it is on the sky everyday. Yet, it harbours many a puzzle for the solar physicist. One of the puzzles concerns its surface and atmospheric temperature. An international team of researchers including one at Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru, has had a go at this question. These observations may have unravelled why the Sun’s atmosphere is hotter than its surface.
• The temperature at the core of the Sun is nearly 15 million degrees Celsius, while that at its surface layer, known as the photosphere, is merely 5,700 degrees C. The natural thing to expect is that still further outwards, in its atmosphere, known as the corona, the temperatures would be comparable to that at the surface (photosphere). However, the temperature of the corona is much higher. It starts increasing outside the photosphere, reaching a value of about one million degrees or more in the corona.

Coronal heating puzzle

• One would expect that as there are no extra sources of heat, when you move away from a hot object, the temperature steadily decreases. However, with respect to the Sun, after dropping to a low, the temperature again rises to one million degrees in the corona which stretches over several million kilometres from the surface of the Sun. This implies there should be a source heating the corona. The puzzle of coronal heating has been tackled by many theories. Now, in a paper published in Science, the team of solar physicists has made observations and matched it with an analysis that explains this conundrum.

Spicules in the Sun

• The key to the puzzle lies in geyser-like jets known as solar spicules that emanate from the interface of the corona and the photosphere. While in a photograph these look like tiny hairlike projections, they are in fact 200-500 kilometres wide and shoot up to heights of about 5,000 km above the solar surface.
• It has been suspected that these spicules act as conduits through which mass and energy from the lower atmosphere bypass the photosphere and reach the corona. The present study, led by Tanmoy Samanta and Hui Tian of Peking University, China, has deciphered how these spicules form and also shows that they act as conduits through which hot plasma is carried into the corona region.
• “Our observations show that these spicules heat up while propagating upward, reaching the coronal temperature. They are made of plasma – a mixture of positive ions and negatively charged electrons,” says Dr Samanta. Objects at different temperatures emit light of different wavelengths. “The coronal plasma emits light in extreme ultraviolet. We find an increase in coronal intensity (emission) as spicules propagate upwards,” he explains.
• The team did their observations using the 1.6-metre Goode Solar Telescope at the Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO), the world’s largest solar telescope, with the NIRIS instrument. “This is a high-precision instrument and can measure magnetic fields with high sensitivity,” says Dipankar Banerjee, from Indian Institute of Astrophysics and one of the authors of the paper. The researchers also matched these observations with simultaneous observations form the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly in NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory spacecraft. Frequent images
• The research involved taking many high-spatial-resolution images of the same region of the Sun within a short time. This is known as high-cadence. “Since spicules have a very short lifetime – from 10 to 100 seconds – to understand their dynamics, we need a higher cadence. This is also a limiting factor of many solar telescopes,” says Dr Samanta.
• The key findings are that bursts of spicules originate from the boundaries of web like networks of magnetic structures in the surface. Near their footpoints, there emerge magnetic elements that have opposite polarity to the existing magnetic network. When the structures with opposing polarity run into each other, they cancel out. This was seen at the footpoints of some spicules. “Exactly at the time of cancellation, we found the presence of spicules, which are also responsible for heating the upper atmosphere,” says Dr Samanta, explaining how the spicules originate as per their observations

MCQ 5

1. Dibang is the tributary of lohit river in arunachal Pradesh
2. The sisseri river bridge was constructed by ‘project brahmank’ of border roads organisation (BRO).

Choose correct

(A) Only 1
 (B) Only 2
(C) Both
(D) None

• Sisseri River Bridge:
• Recently, the Defence Minister inaugurated the Sisseri River Bridge located at lower Dibang Valley in Arunachal Pradesh.
• The 200m long bridge provides connectivity between Dibang Valley and Siang.
• The bridge was constructed by ‘Project Brahmank’ of Border Roads Organisation (BRO). This bridge is strategically important from the military viewpoint and will be a part of Trans Arunachal Highway.

MCQ 6

1. ‘Nadu-Nedu’ programme has been launched in Telangana
2. The programme seeks to transform government schools into vibrant and competitive institutions.

Choose correct

(A) Only 1
 (B) Only 2
(C) Both
(D) None

• Nadu-Nedu’ programme has been launched in Andhra Pradesh.
• The programme seeks to transform government schools into vibrant and competitive institutions.
• Key features of the programme:
• Aim: to transform all government schools with required infrastructure and up- gradation of skills besides setting up English labs.
• It also seeks to provide basic amenities such as clean water, furniture, compound wall, toilets etc.
• Teachers would be imparted training to effectively implement the decision to introduce English medium from Classes 1 to 6 in government schools from the next academic year.
• The parent committees and locals would be involved to make it an inclusive system. Criticisms:
• A language war has erupted in Andhra Pradesh. In this age of rapid globalization, the detractors, primarily the Opposition, has argued that the state should stick to Telugu to protect itself from cultural degradation, else it would endanger the regional language’s survival. Need for English education:
• Language is a means of communication. Today English is a global language, but our vernacular languages are where our thoughts form. At the same time, English is needed to reach out to people at a global level.

MCQ 7

1. There are 38 World Heritage Sites located in India, the largest number of sites in a country in the world.
2. Each World Heritage Site no more remains a part of the legal territory of the state wherein the site is located, becomes global entity

Choose correct

(A) Only 1
(B) Only 2
(C) Both
(D) None

• As of July 2019, there are a total of 1,121 World Heritage Sites located in 167 States Parties (countries that have adhered to the World Heritage Convention, including the non-member state of the Holy See), of which 869 are cultural, 213 are natural and 39 are mixed properties.[1] The countries have been divided by the World Heritage Committee into five geographic zones: Africa, Arab States, Asia and the Pacific, Europe and North America, and Latin America and the Caribbean. China and Italy have the highest number of World Heritage Sites, both with 55 entries.
• However, 27 state parties have no properties inscribed on the World Heritage List: Bahamas, Bhutan, Brunei, Burundi, Comoros, Cook Islands, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Grenada, GuineaBissau, Guyana, Kuwait, Liberia, Maldives, Monaco, Niue, Rwanda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Sao Tome and Principe, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Timor-Leste, Tonga and Trinidad and Tobago

World Heritage Week

• is celebrated by UNESCO between November 19, 2019 and November 25, 2019.
• The Objective of celebrating World Heritage Week is to increase awareness among people about safety and preservation of cultural heritages and monuments.
• There are 38 World Heritage Sites located in India. These include 30 cultural sites, seven natural sites and one mixed site. India has the sixth largest number of sites in the world.

UNESCO world heritage site:

• It is a place that is listed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)as of special cultural or physical significance.
• The list is maintained by the international World Heritage Programme administered by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, composed of 21 UNESCO member states which are elected by the General Assembly.
• Each World Heritage Site remains part of the legal territory of the state wherein the site is located and UNESCO considers it in the interest of the international community to preserve each site.
• Selection of a site:
•  To be selected, a World Heritage Site must be an already classified landmark, unique in some respect as a geographically and historically identifiable place having special cultural or physical significance (such as an ancient ruin or historical structure, building, city, complex, desert, forest, island, lake, monument, mountain, or wilderness area). It may signify a remarkable accomplishment of humanity, and serve as evidence of our intellectual history on the planet. Legal status of designated sites:
• UNESCO designation as a World Heritage Site provides prima facie evidence that such culturally sensitive sites are legally protected pursuant to the Law of War, under the Geneva Convention, its articles, protocols and customs, together with other treaties including the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and international law.

 What are endangered sites?

• A site may be added to the List of World Heritage in Danger if there are conditions that threaten the characteristics for which the landmark or area was inscribed on the World Heritage List. Such problems may involve armed conflict and war, natural disasters, pollution, poaching, or uncontrolled urbanization or human development.
• This danger list is intended to increase international awareness of the threats and to encourage counteractive measures.
• Review: The state of conservation for each site on the danger list is reviewed on a yearly basis, after which the committee may request additional measures, delete the property from the list if the threats have ceased or consider deletion from both the List of World Heritage in Danger and the World Heritage List.

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