Science & Technology Mixed Quiz: Set 13

The correct answer is A, the collector current divided by the base current. Beta is the current gain of a bipolar junction transistor in the common emitter configuration: a very small change in the base current produces a much larger change in the collector current, and the ratio of the two is beta, which commonly lies between about twenty and several hundred. This is why a transistor can act as an amplifier. Option B is wrong because the base current divided by the emitter current is a small fraction with no standard symbol. Option C is wrong because it inverts the alpha ratio. Option D is wrong because the collector current divided by the emitter current is alpha, which is slightly less than one. The two quantities are linked, since beta equals alpha divided by one minus alpha.

The correct answer is C, about 1.1 eV. The energy gap between the valence band and the conduction band decides whether a solid conducts: in silicon the gap is roughly 1.1 electron volts, small enough for heat or light to lift some electrons across it, which is what makes silicon a semiconductor. Option A is wrong because 0.3 volt is the forward barrier voltage of a germanium diode, a different quantity altogether. Option B is wrong because about 0.7 eV is the band gap of germanium, the other elemental semiconductor, and it is also the forward voltage drop of a silicon diode, which is why candidates confuse the two numbers. Option D is wrong because about 5.5 eV is the gap in diamond, an insulator. Learn the trio together: germanium 0.7 eV, silicon 1.1 eV, gallium arsenide about 1.43 eV.

The correct answer is B, the IndiaAI Independent Business Division under the Digital India Corporation, which works under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. The Cabinet decision of 7 March 2024 named this division as the implementing agency for all seven components of the mission. Option A is wrong, and it is the trap in this question: NITI Aayog is the body that wrote the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence in 2018, so it shaped policy, but it does not run the mission. Option C is wrong because the Defence Research and Development Organisation develops defence systems, including its own AI work, but has no role in administering IndiaAI. Option D is wrong because the Indian Space Research Organisation is the national space agency and is unconnected with this mission. Hold the division of labour: NITI Aayog wrote the strategy, MeitY runs the mission.

The correct answer is C, August 2021. The Prime Minister announced the National Hydrogen Mission in his Independence Day speech from the Red Fort on 15 August 2021, with the aim of making India a hub for producing and exporting green hydrogen. Green hydrogen is made by splitting water through electrolysis using electricity from solar, wind or other renewable sources, so it releases no carbon dioxide, unlike the grey hydrogen made from natural gas. The Union Cabinet later approved the National Green Hydrogen Mission in January 2023 with an outlay of Rs 19,744 crore. Option A is wrong because May 2021 saw no such announcement. Option B is wrong because November 2021 is when the Prime Minister gave the Panchamrit climate pledges at the Glasgow COP26 summit. Option D is wrong because January 2021 belongs to the vaccination drive against Covid-19, not to hydrogen. Exam tip: announced 15 August 2021; the mission was approved by the Cabinet in January 2023.

The correct answer is B, the doubling of the number of transistors on a chip over a regular period. Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, observed in 1965 that the number of components that could be packed economically into an integrated circuit was doubling at a steady rate, and the observation, later quoted as a doubling roughly every two years, became the planning rule of the whole industry. Option A is wrong because the behaviour of a pure semiconductor at absolute zero, where it acts as an insulator, follows from band theory and not from any law of Moore. Option C is wrong because the blocking voltage of a diode is its breakdown rating. Option D is wrong because electron speed in a vacuum tube belongs to an earlier technology that the transistor replaced. Moore's law is an empirical trend, not a law of physics.

The correct answer is B, swine flu. Swine flu is an influenza infection of the type first recognised in pigs, and the name itself records the animal in which the virus circulates before it passes to people; once it is in a human population it spreads from person to person by droplets. Option A is wrong because Nipah virus infection is linked to fruit bats, which contaminate date palm sap and fruit, although pigs did act as intermediate hosts in an early outbreak in South East Asia. Option C is wrong; Zika is a virus carried by Aedes mosquitoes, the same group that carries dengue and chikungunya. Option D is wrong because plague is a bacterial disease carried by the flea of the rat. Learn the animal attached to each name, since the paper may ask for the animal, the vector or the kind of germ.

The correct answer is C, AlphaGo, built by DeepMind, which beat the South Korean Go champion Lee Sedol in a five-game match in 2016; the victory mattered because Go has far more possible positions than chess, so brute-force search alone cannot win and the program relied on deep neural networks with reinforcement learning. Option A is wrong because Deep Blue was IBM’s chess computer, which defeated the world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, nineteen years earlier and at a different game. Option B is wrong because Watson, also from IBM, is the question-answering system that won the American television quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011. Option D is wrong because ELIZA was a simple conversational program of the mid-1960s and played no games at all. Keep the three pairs: Deep Blue and chess, Watson and a quiz, AlphaGo and Go.

The correct answer is D, 1.6 W/kg. The Specific Absorption Rate measures how much radio energy from a handset the body takes in, in watts per kilogram of tissue. From 1 September 2012 the Department of Telecommunications made 1.6 W/kg, averaged over one gram of human tissue, the limit for every new mobile handset design sold in India. Before that India followed the older figure of 2.0 W/kg averaged over ten grams. The rules also require the SAR value to be printed on the handset and its box, and a buyer can check it by dialling a code given by the maker. India's limit matches the standard used in the United States. Option A is wrong because 1.8 W/kg is not a prescribed limit anywhere. Option B is wrong because 2.1 W/kg is not a SAR standard. Option C is wrong because 2.2 W/kg is only a distractor. Exam tip: India's SAR limit is 1.6 W/kg over 1 gram of tissue, in force from 1 September 2012.

The correct answer is C, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. The India Semiconductor Mission was set up to carry out the Semicon India programme, which the Union Cabinet approved in December 2021 with an outlay of 76,000 crore rupees, and it works as a specialised division under this ministry, handling the schemes for semiconductor fabs, display fabs, compound semiconductor and packaging units, and design linked incentives. Option A is wrong because the Ministry of Heavy Industries handles capital goods and the incentive scheme for electric vehicles. Option B is wrong because the Ministry of Science and Technology runs research departments such as the Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Biotechnology. Option D is wrong because the Ministry of Commerce and Industry handles trade policy and the wider Make in India effort rather than this mission.

The correct answer is B, Trombay. Apsara went critical at Trombay near Mumbai on 4 August 1956 and was the first nuclear research reactor not only in India but in the whole of Asia; the CIRUS reactor of 1960 and the Dhruva reactor of 1985 were built at the same site, which is today the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. Option A is wrong because Kalpakkam in Tamil Nadu is the home of the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research and of the fast breeder reactors, work that began much later. Option C is wrong because Rawatbhata in Rajasthan is a power station site, not a research reactor site. Option D is wrong because Tarapur is also a power station, commissioned thirteen years after Apsara. Keep research reactors at Trombay and fast breeders at Kalpakkam clearly apart.

The correct answer is B, NITI Aayog, which published the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence in June 2018 under the slogan AI for All, and identified five priority sectors: healthcare, agriculture, education, smart cities and infrastructure, and smart mobility and transportation. Option A is wrong, though it is the closest distractor, because the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology runs the IndiaAI Mission approved in 2024 but did not write the 2018 strategy paper. Option C is wrong because the Reserve Bank of India is the central bank and its work on technology concerns payments, digital lending and the digital rupee, not a national AI strategy. Option D is wrong because the University Grants Commission regulates higher education and frames curricula; it does not issue national technology strategies. Pair the year with the body: 2018 with NITI Aayog, 2024 with MeitY.

The correct answer is B, the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee. Working under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, it is the apex committee under the rules of 1989 framed under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, and no genetically engineered organism may be released into the environment or used on a large scale without its clearance. Option A is wrong because the Review Committee on Genetic Manipulation, under the Department of Biotechnology, monitors research and small scale trials rather than commercial release. Option C is wrong because the National Biodiversity Authority, at Chennai, deals with access to biological resources and benefit sharing under the Act of 2002. Option D is wrong because ICAR conducts agricultural research and coordinates trials but grants no biosafety approval. Learn the pair as RCGM for research and GEAC for release.

The correct answer is B, Assembly, Testing, Marking and Packaging. Chip making has three broad stages: design, which is done by fabless companies and design houses; fabrication, in which circuits are built on a silicon wafer in a fab; and the back end, in which the wafer is cut into individual chips that are then assembled, tested, marked and packaged, which is what ATMP means. Firms that do only this back end work for others are called OSAT units, that is outsourced semiconductor assembly and test. Option A is wrong because it is an invented expansion. Option C is wrong because thermal metal plating is a different industrial process. Option D is wrong because it too is invented. India's first approved projects under the Semicon India programme were largely of this back end kind, which makes the term examinable.

The correct answer is D, SIL-4. Safety Integrity Level is a scale of four grades used for safety related electronic systems, and level four is the most demanding, meaning the probability of a dangerous undetected failure is designed to be the lowest of all. Signalling and train protection systems on main line railways are built to this level because a single failure can cost many lives, and Kavach was certified accordingly before being adopted as the national Automatic Train Protection standard. Options A, B and C, the lower levels, are used for systems whose failure carries a smaller consequence, such as some industrial process controls and auxiliary equipment; accepting a lower level for train protection would defeat its purpose. A candidate who remembers only the phrase highest level will still get this question right, because SIL-4 is the highest of the four.

The correct answer is B, generative pre-trained transformer. Each word carries meaning: generative, because the model produces new text rather than only sorting what it is shown; pre-trained, because it first learns general language from a very large body of text before being adapted to particular tasks; and transformer, the neural network architecture, built on an attention mechanism, that made such models practical. Option A is wrong because general processing technology is not a term used for these models and describes nothing specific. Option C is wrong because graphical pattern trainer confuses the model with the graphics processing unit, the GPU, which is the hardware used to train it, not the model itself. Option D is wrong because global predictive tool is an invented expansion. Expect the full forms of AI, ML, NLP, GPU and GPT to be asked directly in objective papers.

The correct answer is C, China. BeiDou is the Chinese global navigation satellite system, built in phases and now offering worldwide coverage, and the name is the Chinese term for the constellation of the Big Dipper.

Option A, Japan, operates QZSS, the Quasi-Zenith Satellite System, which like NavIC is regional rather than global. Option B, Russia, operates GLONASS, the successor of the Soviet system of the same design. Option D, the European Union, operates Galileo, a civil global system deliberately kept outside military control. Add GPS of the United States and India's NavIC and the list is complete, with only NavIC and QZSS being regional. Examiners ask this as a simple pair matching question, so learn the five names with their owners, and remember that the general term for all of them is a global navigation satellite system.

The correct answer is A, Mohali. The Semi-Conductor Laboratory at Mohali in Punjab works under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and is India's own fabrication unit, producing chips at an older process node for strategic users such as the Indian Space Research Organisation and the Defence Research and Development Organisation rather than for the consumer market. Option B is wrong because Hyderabad is a large centre of chip design and of pharmaceutical manufacturing, not the home of this laboratory. Option C is wrong because Bengaluru holds the greatest concentration of semiconductor design centres in India but not this government fab. Option D is wrong because Pune is an engineering and software hub without such a facility. The distinction between a design centre and a fabrication plant is itself a favourite examination point.

The correct answer is B, 23 August 2023. The Vikram lander of Chandrayaan 3 touched down safely in the high latitude region near the lunar south pole on that evening, and the rover Pragyan rolled out soon afterwards. The landing point was named Shiv Shakti Point, and 23 August is now observed every year as National Space Day.

Option A, 14 July 2023, is the launch date of Chandrayaan 3, and mixing the launch with the landing is the commonest error on this topic. Option C, 2 September 2023, is the launch date of Aditya L1, the solar mission. Option D, 7 September 2019, is the date on which the Chandrayaan 2 lander lost contact during its descent and the earlier landing attempt failed, four years before this success.

The correct answer is B, artificial narrow intelligence, also called weak AI. It is trained for a single defined task and cannot transfer that skill to another; every system working today, from spam filters and voice assistants to chess engines and face recognition, is narrow AI. Option A is wrong because artificial general intelligence would equal a human being across any intellectual task, moving freely from one problem to another, and no such system exists. Option C is wrong because artificial super intelligence, which would surpass human ability in every field including creativity and social skill, is purely theoretical and is the stage debated in writing on AI risk. Option D is wrong because theory of mind belongs to the other classification, the one by functionality, which runs reactive machines, limited memory, theory of mind and self-aware machines; it describes a machine that would read emotions and intentions.

The correct answer is B, decreases. Heating a semiconductor gives more electrons enough energy to cross the forbidden gap into the conduction band, and each one that crosses leaves a hole behind, so the number of charge carriers rises sharply and the resistance falls; a semiconductor therefore has a negative temperature coefficient of resistance. Option A is wrong because resistance rises with temperature in metals, where the carrier number is already fixed and heating only increases collisions, and candidates lose the mark by carrying the metal rule over to semiconductors. Option C is wrong because the change is large and easily measured. Option D is wrong because resistance never becomes zero; that is superconductivity, a separate phenomenon seen in certain materials below a critical temperature. At absolute zero a pure semiconductor behaves as an insulator.