Civil Services Exam – Mock Exam

Hint

The Government of India finally decided to ratify the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 182 on the worst forms of child labour and Convention 138 on Minimum Age of Employment.
The main bottleneck in the way of India ratifying Conventions 182 and 138 was addressing forced or compulsory recruitment of children and appropriately raising the age of employment in hazardous occupations from 14 to 18 years.
Consequent to the passing of the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2016 by the Indian Parliament, prohibiting the employment of children up to 14 years of age, and children up to 18 years of age in hazardous occupations, we could ratify Conventions 182 and 138.

Hint

The Report of the Committee to Review the Issues relating to the Coastal Regulation Zone, 2011 was submitted to the government.
Shailesh Nayak Committee has recently relaxed norms under coastal regulation zones.
It has proposed for allowing housing infrastructure and slum redevelopment activities, tourism, ports and harbor and fisheries-related activities in coastal regulation zone.
On development and construction, the report recommends that all activities except those requiring environmental clearances should fall under the ambit of the state and local planning bodies instead of being regulated by central policy.
The areas affected by this amendment would be coastal towns, rural areas and waters up to 12 nautical miles from the coast.
For rural areas with a population density of over 2,161 persons/sq km, the committee has recommended that the “no-development buffer zone” be limited to 50m from the High Tide Line (HTL).
For other areas, the buffer has been recommended at 200m from the HTL.
This HTL, though has not been determined for the country’s coastline yet and is currently being put together by the National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management.

Hint

Microsoft has offered to collaborate with Andhra Pradesh in the areas of e-governance and cyber security.
Microsoft suggested that Andhra Pradesh should nurture hybrid cloud technology and that it will be a great leap in technology for India and Andhra Pradesh in particular.
Skill profile of the population, professionals etc. are also being digitized and the same may be replicated in Andhra Pradesh.
The technology provided by the Microsoft would be utilised, among others to, check school dropouts, improve agricultural productivity and providing better citizen services.
It will seek to improve the use of Information and Communications Technology, drive digital inclusion, etc.
According to the MoU, Microsoft India will provide technical knowledge to the A.P. government and support in building three proof-of-concept (PoC) solutions by applying Microsoft Azure Machine Learning and Advanced Visualization method in the fields of education, agriculture and e-Citizen services.

Hint

Prof. Vishveshwara was the founding director of the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium in Bengaluru.
In the 1970s, while at the University of Maryland, he was among the first to study “black holes” even before they had been so named.
His calculations gave a graphic form to the signal that would be emitted by two merging black holes – this was the waveform detected in 2015 by the LIGO collaboration, and contained the so-called “quasi normal modes” – a ringdown stage that sounds like a bell’s ringing sound that is fading out.
In 2015, at a conference to commemorate the detection of gravitational waves, he jokingly said that he should now probably be known as Quasimodo (after having first discovered the quasi normal modes).
Prof. Vishveshwara also drew cartoons, many of which have been published in physics conference proceedings.
He has written several books including Einstein’s Enigma, or Black Holes in My Bubble Bath.
Professor C.V. Vishveshwara (77), who did pioneering work on black holes, passed away in Bengaluru.

Hint

International Vaccine Institute (IVI) was established in 1997.
The move involves payment of annual contribution of US $ 5,00,000 to the International Vaccine Institute (IVI), Seoul, South Korea.
It was established on the initiatives of the UNDP.
It is an international organization devoted to developing and introducing new and improved vaccines to protect the people, especially children, against deadly infectious diseases.
In the year 2007, with the approval of Cabinet, India joined IVI.
India is a long-term collaborator and stake-holder of IVI.
In December, 2012 the Board of Trustees (BOT) of IVI approved the formation of its new governance structure.
As per the new governance structure of IVI, a member State has to contribute to the IVI by paying a portion of its core budget.

Hint

Ministry of Railways has come up with Mission 41k to save Rs. 41000 crore in the next decade in Railways’ energy costs.
This target will be achieved by taking a slew of measures which include moving 90 per cent of traffic to electric traction over diesel. Presently, this is at 70 per cent of the total rail traffic.
The ministry plans to achieve this target by doubling the current pace of electrification.
The railways also aim to procure more and more electricity at cheaper rates through open market instead of sourcing it through DISCOMs and thereby hopes to save as much as 25 per cent on its energy expenses.
New technologies are also being explored to bring down electric consumption.

Hint

In 1916, G. N. Lewis introduced the electron pair bond.
In chemistry, an electron pair or a Lewis pair consists of two electrons that occupy the same orbital but have opposite spins.
He proposed that two atoms may share from one to six electrons forming single, double or triple bonds.
He introduced the cubical atom and six postulates to understand their chemical behaviour.
That chemical bond decides the properties of molecules such as colour, reactivity, solubility, etc. all of which decide their applications.

Hint

The Indian long pepper, widely popular for spicing up food, may soon be used as a potential cancer treatment drug, according to a new study.
The Indian long pepper contains a chemical that could stop your body from producing an enzyme that is commonly found in tumours in large numbers.
UT Southwestern Medical Enter scientists have uncovered the chemical process behind anti-cancer properties of a spicy Indian pepper plant called the long pepper, whose suspected medicinal properties date back thousands of years.
The secret lies in a chemical called Piperlongumine (PL), which has shown activity against many cancers including prostate, breast, lung, colon, lymphoma, leukemia, primary brain tumors and gastric cancer.

Hint

With digital e-wallet Toka Paisa, which also has a smart-card version Assam became the first state in eastern India to have its own e-wallet.
Until now (15th January 2017) only Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra have their own e-wallets.
The E-wallet has a local language interface, which was developed by techies from the state-owned Assam Electronics Development Corporation Limited (AMTRON).

Hint

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Saur Sujala Yojana in Chhattisgarh that would provide solar powered irrigation pumps to farmers at a subsidized price.
Chhattisgarh would be the first state to implement the scheme.
Under the scheme, solar powered irrigation pumps of 3HP and 5HP capacity would be distributed to the farmers by March 31, 2019.
The beneficiaries would get the pumps at the subsidized price.
The scheme will be given priority in those areas where electricity connection has not reached yet.

Hint

The Bio-Indicator Lidar Instrument, or BILI is a fluorescence-based lidar, a type of remote-sensing instrument similar to radar in principle and operation.
Instead of using radio waves, however, lidar instruments use light to detect and ultimately analyse the composition of particles in the atmosphere.

Hint

Frankenfixation refers to the use of genetic modification to fix carbon dioxide into the soil.
It derives from term popularized by critics of genetically modified foods, ‘Frankenfoods’.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute recently oversaw an effort to piece together an artificial metabolism from the bits and pieces of biosynthetic pathways that were once scattered across the three kingdoms of life.
What they found was a novel pathway based on a new CO2-fixing enzyme that is nearly 20 times faster than the most prevalent enzyme in nature responsible for capturing CO2 in plants by using sunlight as energy.

Hint

The High Level Meeting of Interior Ministers of Indian Ocean Region (IOR) to Counter Drug Trafficking was held in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
It had adopted Colombo declaration. It was resolved to work towards making the region a “Drug Free Zone”.

Features of the declaration are –

Narcotic drug trafficking has links possibly to organized crime and funding of terrorism.
It stresses on need for stricter enforcement of maritime laws and cooperation by the coastal statesm
They must provide mutual legal assistance and share information in narcotic drug trafficking.
It calls for the expansion and development of communication through the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC’s) Indian Ocean Prosecutors Network.

Hint

‘Cold Start’ is a military strategy thought to be developed for fighting Pakistan. It essentially means to mobilize troops very quickly.
It is part of the army’s attempt to develop a useable, conventional retaliatory option that punishes Pakistan for terrorist attacks against India without triggering wider conventional or nuclear escalation. In its more aggressive formulations, it was believed the aim was to create division-sized formations that could rapidly mobilise and carry out short-notice, retaliatory offensives of limited duration to quickly seize and hold Pakistani territory, while simultaneously pursuing narrow enough objectives to deny Islamabad a justification to escalate the conflict by opening additional conventional fronts or to employ nuclear weapons.

Hint

Non-photochemical quenching is process of releasing heat from plants to protect itself from absorbed sunlight.Energy from sunlight is captured by the green pigment called chlorophyll in the leaves for photosynthesis. But this energy can also damage the leaves (the way we can get sun-burnt).
Plants protect themselves from such light-induced damage by releasing heat (like we use sun-tan lotions or dark glasses for protection). Such “quenching” of excess solar energy must be quick.

Hint

Indian Rhino Vision 2020 programme (IRV2020), a collaborative effort between various organisations, including :
1. International Rhino Foundation,
2. Assam’s Forest Department,
3. Bodoland Territorial Council,
4. WWF-India, and
5. The US Fish and Wildlife Service.
IRV 2020 hopes to raise the number of rhinos in Assam to 3,000 by 2020.

Hint

Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) is the charge (rate) charged by the bank to the merchants for letting the merchants collect payments through swiping of credit and debit cards. The merchant discount rate is expressed in percentage of the transaction amount.
The merchant needs to open an account with the bank.

Hint

Montane laughingthrushes are endemic to the Western Ghats.
BirdLife International, an organisation which assesses the conservation status of birds globally, has split the group of montane laughingthrushes and recognised them as two new species.

As a result, Kerala now has four mountain laughingthrushes in place of two.

The newly accepted species are Banasura laughingthrush (Trochalopteron jerdoni), which has a very restricted distribution in Wayanad district and Travancore laughingthrush (Trochalopteron merdionale) found in Thiruvananthapuram district.

The conservation status of the Banasura species was assessed as endangered.

The Travancore variety was considered vulnerable, considering the risk both the species were facing.

The two original species of the family were Nilgiri laughingthrush and Palani laughingthrush.

The Nilgiri species, assessed as an endangered one, is found in Silent Valley National Park and Siruvani hills of Kerala.

The near-threatened Palani laughingthrush is found mainly in Munnar hills and the mountains of Periyar Tiger Reserve apart from Grass Hills and Palani hills in Tamil Nadu.

Laughingthrushes are found only in the peaks of Western Ghats, popularly known as sky islands.

These mountain peaks are separated from the others so well that the birds from one sky island find difficult to move to the next sky island.

Hint

Biofortification is the idea of breeding crops to increase their nutritional value.
This can be done either through conventional selective breeding, or through genetic engineering.
Biofortification differs from ordinary fortification because it focuses on making plant foods more nutritious as the plants are growing, rather than having nutrients added to the foods when they are being processed.
It has proposed as a strategy to counter malnutrition ‘Nutrition gardens’ (botanical gardens with plants considered rich in vitamins, iron, iodine etc.) along with