Teaching Weekly Current Affairs Quiz: 31 August – 6 September 2026

The correct answer is the fifth edition, written in official papers as SSSS v.5.0. The release says the campaign builds on its success over the last four years, which is the internal check an aspirant can apply: four earlier editions plus the one being launched makes this the fifth. Dr Jitendra Singh, Minister of State with Independent Charge for Earth Sciences, launched it, and the Ministry of Earth Sciences runs it. The week itself falls from 12 to 19 September 2026. Option B is the trap for anyone who counts only the completed editions and forgets to add the new one, and options A and D are placed on either side of the answer for the same reason. A safer way to hold the fact is through the official name: the campaign is styled 5.0, and the version number is the edition number.

The correct answer is the Centre for Nano and Soft Matter Sciences, Bengaluru, an autonomous institute under the Department of Science and Technology. The release names it as the institute whose researchers took up peptides, and the work was led there by Dr Goutam Ghosh with his doctoral scholar Aparna Ramesh. Options B and C are the collaborating institutions and are therefore the sharpest distractors: IISER Kolkata and JNCASR Bengaluru both contributed, and researchers from both are credited, but neither led the study. Option D does not appear in the release at all. Candidates should carry the parent department with the institute, since a question is often set on which department funds or governs a research body in the news. Note also that the discovery was published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, a journal name that has itself been asked.

The correct answer is 15 August 2020. The release states that the Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment launched the Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan on that date to combat the demand for drugs in the country, which is why the campaign is now marking its sixth anniversary with a National Mass Pledge Against Drug Abuse. Options A, C and D are national dates of the kind examiners attach to schemes to see whether a candidate has memorised the correct one; none of them appears in this release. The anniversary arithmetic is itself a favourite question, so keep the launch year and the ordinal number together. Two more facts belong with the answer: the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment is the nodal Ministry for the campaign, and the pledge aims to bring in more than 10 crore citizens through physical and online participation.

The correct answer is 82. The release records that 82 teachers and educators were selected for the National Teachers Awards this year, and that they came from three departments. The break-up is worth memorising because a paper setter can ask for any one part of it: 48 teachers from the Department of School Education and Literacy, 21 teachers and faculty members from higher educational institutions and polytechnics, and 13 skill trainers from the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. Add those three numbers and you get the total of 82, which is a quick way to check yourself in the examination hall. Option A, option C and option D are not supported anywhere in the release; they are the kind of round or near-miss figures that distractors are usually built from. Note also that the awards were conferred by President Droupadi Murmu at a function in New Delhi on Teachers' Day, 5 September 2026, while the Prime Minister had met the same winners at his residence a day earlier.

The correct answer is the Vice President of India, C. P. Radhakrishnan. The release records that he launched the India Valve Registry at India Valves 2026, a national academic meeting on valvular and structural heart disease held in Chennai. Option C and option D are the kind of distractors a paper setter builds from the guest list: the event was attended by the Tamil Nadu Minister for Health, Medical Education and Family Welfare, K. G. Arunraj, along with senior cardiologists from Chennai, New Delhi and Gurugram, but the launch itself was done by the Vice President. Option A is wrong because the President of India had no role in this event; on the same day the President was conferring the National Awards to Teachers in New Delhi, which is a separate item of news. When two similar national launches appear in the same week, tie each one to the dignitary and the city together. Here the unit to remember is Vice President, India Valve Registry, India Valves 2026, Chennai.

The correct answer is the Ministry of Earth Sciences. The campaign is spearheaded by that ministry, and the minister who launched it, Dr Jitendra Singh, holds Earth Sciences as Minister of State with Independent Charge. The three wrong options are all ministries whose work touches the sea, the coast or cleanliness in some way, which is exactly why a candidate can be led astray; but none of them is named here. Two further links are worth carrying into the examination hall. The campaign draws on the Swachh Bharat vision for its cleanliness idea, and it draws on the Deep Ocean Mission, launched by the Prime Minister, for its ocean science idea. The ministry brings citizens, students, youth, coastal communities and volunteer organisations together for the drive under the banner of Jan Bhagidari, or public participation.

The correct answer is by adding one per cent of a suitable co-solvent. The team found that in water the peptide molecules form nanofibers and show no piezoelectric response. Introducing just that small share of a co-solvent reorganised the molecules into a highly ordered supramolecular arrangement, and the piezoelectric response switched on at once. Option A is precisely what the study did not do, and the release stresses the point: the chemical composition of the peptide was left untouched, and the key lay in controlling how the molecules assemble rather than in altering the molecule. Option C would defeat the purpose, since the aim was to replace brittle ceramics with a soft, biocompatible material. Option D is invented. The physical reason for the switch is worth remembering: controlled chiral self-assembly aligns molecular dipoles into a non-centrosymmetric structure, the basic condition for piezoelectricity.

The correct answer is more than 34.56 crore. That is the total reach of the campaign as stated in the release. The two smaller figures in options A and B are real but are subsets of the total, and they are the traps that cost marks: over 13.71 crore of those reached are youth and over 10.65 crore are women. Option C is invented. A candidate should therefore read whether the question asks for the total, the youth figure or the women's figure. One more number belongs in the same group and is asked just as often: more than 1.64 lakh Nasha Mukti Mitras have joined the campaign to strengthen community participation, and a citizen may register as one through the Department's official website. Keep the de-addiction helpline number 14446 with these figures as well.

The correct answer is the Department of School Education and Literacy. Of the 82 awardees, 48 came from that department, which is well over half the total and easily the largest block. Option A is wrong because the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship contributed 13 skill trainers, the smallest of the three groups. Option B is wrong in the form it is written: the higher education share of 21 awardees came from higher educational institutions and polytechnics, and the release does not credit it to the Department of Higher Education by that name; even if it did, 21 is smaller than 48. Option D does not figure in the release at all. Remember the order of the three groups from largest to smallest as 48, 21 and 13, because questions in this pattern often ask for the smallest share rather than the largest one. The awards were conferred by President Droupadi Murmu in New Delhi on Teachers' Day.

The correct answer is transcatheter valve interventions. The release describes the registry as a collaborative multicentre initiative for the systematic, secure and de-identified collection of real-world data on transcatheter valve interventions across India, with the aim of strengthening India-specific clinical evidence and improving patient care. Options B, C and D name common surgical procedures that have nothing to do with this registry, and they are placed there to catch a candidate who remembers only the word registry. The medical context is worth a line in your notes: valvular and structural heart disease is the subject of India Valves 2026, and a valve registry records which patients underwent a valve intervention, what treatment they received and how their outcomes moved over time. The Vice President explained the purpose in a memorable phrase, saying such registries create our country's own data for our own countrymen, so that doctors can understand outcomes, identify gaps and improve care.

The correct answer is the Ocean Olympiad, described in the release as the first-ever national event of its kind under the campaign. It is aimed at students and young people and is meant to build awareness of the environment; citizens can register for it and test their knowledge of the seas. The other options are activities that the week really does include, which makes them plausible, but none of them is presented as a first. Marathons, a human chain and cycling rallies are listed among the engagement activities, alongside beach clean-up drives at more than 100 locations and programmes tied to ozone day. Along with the Olympiad, the launch covered an official ocean conservation pledge, the campaign website, an introductory video, a video on the schedule of activities and the SAGAR PRAHARI mobile application.

The correct answer is a non-centrosymmetric structure. The release explains that controlled chiral self-assembly aligns the molecular dipoles into such a structure, and calls it a fundamental structural requirement for piezoelectricity. Option A names the exact opposite and is the distractor a careless reader picks, since the two words differ by one prefix; a centrosymmetric arrangement cancels the dipoles and gives no piezoelectric response. Option B is wrong because the material's performance came precisely from a highly ordered supramolecular arrangement, not from disorder. Option D names a crystal lattice type from general chemistry that the release never mentions. The practical outcome is worth attaching to the term: the engineered peptide nanomaterials reached a piezoelectric coefficient of nearly 30 pm per volt, and such materials could one day power wearable electronics, implantable sensors, electronic skin and biosensors from body movement alone.

The correct answer is the National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre at AIIMS, New Delhi. The release explains that the Ministry runs a comprehensive and evidence-based strategy under the National Action Plan for Drug Demand Reduction, and that the strategy is based on the findings of the first National Survey on the Extent and Pattern of Substance Use in India, carried out by that centre. Options A and C name agencies associated with crime statistics and with narcotics enforcement, which sound plausible in a drug-related question but belong to a different ministry and a different function. Option D is a well-known medical research body that the release does not mention here. Under the plan the Ministry gives financial assistance to State Governments, Union Territories, non-government organisations and government hospitals for preventive education, awareness generation, counselling, treatment and rehabilitation.

The correct answer is Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. The releases of the day tie the occasion directly to him: President Droupadi Murmu paid floral tributes to Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, a former President of India, at Rashtrapati Bhavan, and the Prime Minister said that Teachers' Day is also a day to pay homage to Dr S. Radhakrishnan. Option A names the first President of India, who is remembered on other occasions and not on Teachers' Day. Option B names another former President who came from an educational background, which makes him a plausible distractor, but the day is not observed for him. Option D names a former President widely associated with students and with Students' Day tributes, which again makes the option tempting, but the release of 5 September 2026 does not connect him with this day. The safe way to hold this item is to pair the date, the man and the event: 5 September, Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and the National Awards to Teachers conferred by the President.

The correct answer is Swasth Bharat. Referring to the national goal of building a Viksit Bharat by 2047, the Vice President said that a developed India must also be a healthy India, and the release carries the line as one of its highlighted quotations. Options A, B and D name other well-known national missions and slogans, each of which a candidate may link to a government speech, but the phrase used on this occasion pairs Viksit Bharat with Swasth Bharat. The rest of the address supports the same idea: healthcare is a human right and should be accessible to everyone, every advance in medical science carries a duty to make its benefits inclusive, and India demonstrated its medical and technological capability during the COVID-19 pandemic by developing vaccines for its own people and supplying them to around 100 countries. Remember the year 2047 with the phrase, because questions often test the pairing of the slogan with the target year.

The correct answer is over 11,000 km. In his video message the Minister said India has one of the longest stretches of coastal area in the world, spanning more than that distance and extending from the eastern to the western parts of the country, and he used the figure to explain why a week-long national drive is worth running. Aspirants often carry an older coastline figure in memory from school textbooks, and option A is placed there precisely to catch that habit; for this question the number to reproduce is the one the Minister used in this launch. The rest of the campaign facts sit around it: the fifth edition, the dates of 12 to 19 September 2026, the Ministry of Earth Sciences as the organiser, clean-up drives at more than 100 locations and the first national Ocean Olympiad.