General Science Mixed Quiz: Set 109

Saffron is made from the stigmas of the flower of Crocus sativus, and since each flower carries only three stigmas which must be picked by hand, the spice is the most expensive in the world; in India it is grown mainly in the Kashmir valley.

The 2011 FSSAI labelling rules made the list of ingredients, nutrition information and the vegetarian or non-vegetarian mark compulsory, but not medical advice on allergies.

A geostationary satellite is placed in a circular orbit about 35,786 kilometres above the equator, where its period of revolution equals the period of rotation of the earth about its axis, and it moves from west to east like the earth, so it appears to stay over the same point…

Meiosis makes gametes that differ from one another, and fertilization joins a gamete from each of two parents, so every offspring gets a new mix of genes.

Quinine is an alkaloid extracted from the bark of trees of the genus Cinchona, native to South America and grown in India in the Nilgiris and in Darjeeling, and it was the standard treatment for malaria before synthetic drugs appeared.

The de Broglie wavelength depends only on momentum, so equal wavelengths mean equal momenta. In 1924 Louis de Broglie proposed that every moving particle has a wave linked to it, with wavelength λ = h/p, where h is Planck's constant and p is the linear momentum.

It appears brightest because it is both luminous and close, about 8.6 light years away, and it is in fact a binary system with a white dwarf companion.

Marie Curie discovered radium; the first two pairs have their discoveries swapped. Marie Curie and Pierre Curie discovered the radioactive elements polonium and radium in 1898, and Marie Curie went on to win Nobel Prizes in both physics (1903) and chemistry (1911).

Clove is the unopened flower bud of Syzygium aromaticum, picked before it blooms and dried, and it is grown in India chiefly in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Pinctada margaritifera is the black lip pearl oyster, a bivalve mollusc of the warm shallow water of the Indo-Pacific, where it fastens itself to coral reefs by strong threads.

It is a spiral galaxy of a few hundred billion stars, and the solar system lies in one of its spiral arms, far from the centre, which is why we see the galaxy edge on as a milky band across the night sky.

Pliers and scissors are each made of two arms joined at one rivet, and each arm is a complete class 1 lever, so the tool is called a double lever.

Jute is a bast or stem fibre taken from the inner bark of plants of the genus Corchorus, extracted by soaking the cut stems in water, a process called retting, and India and Bangladesh are the main producers.

Balance is controlled by the inner ear, which holds the vestibular apparatus alongside the organ of hearing. It is made of three semicircular canals set at right angles to one another and two small sacs, the utricle and the saccule.

India's first satellite was named after the ancient astronomer and mathematician Aryabhata, was built by the Indian Space Research Organisation and was launched in April 1975 from the Soviet Union, since India had no launch vehicle of its own at the time; it carried experiments in X-ray astronomy and solar…

Friction acts only where two surfaces touch, while a magnet can push or pull an object across a gap. Forces are grouped by whether the bodies must touch.

Cytokinins promote cytokinesis, that is cell division; kinetin was the first of them to be identified, from the degraded DNA of herring sperm, and zeatin, the natural form, was obtained from maize grains.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar showed that a white dwarf, which is supported against gravity by the pressure of degenerate electrons, cannot have a mass greater than about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun; beyond that limit the star collapses further, and the work brought him the Nobel Prize in Physics in…

Of the three, only red sanders is native to India; cashew and papaya were brought from the Americas. Red sanders (Pterocarpus santalinus) is endemic to the southern Eastern Ghats, mainly the Seshachalam and nearby hills of Andhra Pradesh.

Massive giant stars burn their fuel so fast that they live much shorter lives than dwarf stars, so Statement I is false and Statement II is true.