Static GK GK Questions with Answers – Page 29

Nag is a third generation fire and forget anti tank missile of the IGMDP, and its helicopter launched version is called Helina.

BrahMos is built by a joint venture of India and Russia, and its name joins the Brahmaputra of India with the Moskva of Russia; it is a supersonic cruise missile that flies at nearly three times the speed of sound and can be launched from land, ships, submarines and aircraft.

The Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme was approved in 1983 and run under his leadership at the Defence Research and Development Laboratory, which is why he is called the Missile Man of India; it produced Prithvi, Agni, Trishul, Akash and Nag.

The National Defence Academy is the only academy in which cadets of the Army, Navy and Air Force undergo joint training before moving to their own service academies for pre commission training.

On the night of 4 December 1971 Indian missile boats attacked Karachi harbour in Operation Trident, sinking Pakistani vessels without loss, and the Navy marks the date as Navy Day.

On 15 January 1949 General K. M. Cariappa took charge as the first Indian Commander in Chief of the Indian Army, replacing the last British holder of the post, and the day has been observed as Army Day ever since.

Article 53 of the Constitution vests the supreme command of the defence forces of the Union in the President, and the exercise of that command is regulated by law; commissions to officers are granted in the President's name.

In 1643 the Italian scientist Torricelli filled a long glass tube with mercury and inverted it in a dish, and the column that stayed up showed that the air outside was pressing on the mercury; that apparatus is the mercury barometer, and the unit torr is named after him.

Babbage designed the difference engine and then the analytical engine, a mechanical machine with a store, a mill and punched card input, which carried every idea of a modern general purpose computer, and he is therefore called the father of the computer.

Working at the CERN laboratory in 1989, Berners-Lee proposed a system of linked documents and wrote the first web browser and server, giving the world HTML, HTTP and the address form known as the URL.

Chadwick showed in 1932 that the radiation given off when beryllium is struck by alpha particles consists of neutral particles of about the mass of a proton, and he named them neutrons; he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for it.

Fleming noticed in 1928 that a mould of the genus Penicillium had killed the bacteria growing around it on a culture plate, and the substance he named penicillin became the first antibiotic; Florey and Chain later turned it into a usable drug and shared the Nobel Prize with him.

The Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel patented dynamite in 1867, a safe way of handling nitroglycerine, and the fortune he made from explosives endowed the Nobel Prizes, first awarded in 1901.

Bell received the patent for the telephone in 1876 and made the first call over a wire, carrying the human voice itself rather than a code.

Paul Hermann Muller is remembered for showing that DDT kills insects, work for which he received a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; vitamin D is associated with Edward Mellanby, who linked its absence to rickets, and with Adolf Windaus, who worked out its chemistry.

In 1796 Jenner showed that material from a cowpox sore protected a boy against smallpox, the first deliberate vaccination, and the word vaccine itself comes from vacca, the Latin for cow.

Roentgen, a German physicist, noticed in 1895 that a screen in his darkened laboratory glowed while a covered discharge tube was running, and he named the unknown radiation X-rays.

India Post moves its mail through six named channels, and there is no 'Monthly channel' among them. Under the Mail Network Optimisation Project the department separated its traffic so that each kind of article travels on a route with its own time norms.

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, has four members — India, the United States, Japan and Australia — and Indonesia is not one of them.

NATO is the military alliance of European and North American states, formed by the North Atlantic Treaty signed at Washington on 4 April 1949 by twelve founding members, and its membership has grown in rounds since then.