Science & Technology Mixed Quiz: Set 17

The correct answer is B, 1997. TRAI was set up under the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India Act, 1997, to regulate telecom services, fix tariffs and protect the interests of consumers once private operators entered the field. An amendment in 2000 took the dispute settlement and appellate work away from TRAI and gave it to a new tribunal, the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal. Option A is wrong because 1994 is the year of the National Telecom Policy that opened the sector, not of the regulator. Option C is wrong because 2000 is the year of that amendment and of the formation of BSNL. Option D is wrong because 2012 is the year of the National Telecom Policy that set broadband goals, long after TRAI already existed.

The correct answer is A, Param 8000. PARAM 8000 was built by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing at Pune and was unveiled in 1991, three years after C-DAC itself was set up in 1988. The project was led by Vijay P. Bhatkar, the founding Director General of C-DAC, and it was taken up because the United States had refused to sell India a Cray supercomputer. The word PARAM means supreme in Sanskrit and also stands for PARAllel Machine, the architecture on which the system was built.

Option B, Aditya, is a high performance computing system of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, commissioned much later, and the name is also used for ISRO solar work, so it is not the first machine. Option C, Anupam-Adhyay, belongs to the Anupam series of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, which serves nuclear research and came after PARAM. Option D, SAGA-220, was built by ISRO at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in 2011, twenty years after PARAM 8000.

The correct answer is B, FLOPS, short for floating point operations per second. A supercomputer is built for scientific calculation on decimal numbers, so the useful measure is how many such operations it finishes in a second, not how fast a single chip ticks. The ladder runs gigaflops, teraflops, petaflops and exaflops, each a thousand times the one before, and the Top500 list ranks the world’s fastest machines by their FLOPS score on the LINPACK benchmark.

Option A, hertz, measures the clock frequency of a processor. It says how many cycles a chip completes in a second but says nothing about how many useful calculations a cluster of thousands of chips finishes together. Option C, bytes per second, measures the rate at which data moves through a network or a disk, which matters for storage but is not the speed of computation. Option D mixes a dated instruction count with a power figure and is not the standard unit.

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 A, IMT-2030 and the Bharat 6G Vision. The International Telecommunication Union has adopted the framework recommendation for IMT-2030, which describes what 6G should achieve: terahertz and other very high frequency bands, latency below a millisecond, artificial intelligence built into the network, communication combined with sensing, satellite-extended coverage and better energy efficiency. India released its Bharat 6G Vision document in 2023 and formed the Bharat 6G Alliance the same year. Option B is wrong because IMT-2020 is 5G and the National Broadband Mission is about fibre and broadband reach. Option C is wrong because IMT-Advanced is 4G and BharatNet is the rural fibre project. Option D is wrong because there is no IMT-2040, and Digital India is a wider governance programme. The stated aim of the Indian effort is that the country should contribute patents and standards to 6G instead of importing them, as it did in the earlier generations.

The correct answer is B, the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. The mission divides the field among four thematic hubs, and quantum computing was assigned to the Indian Institute of Science. Option A is wrong because the Indian Institute of Technology Madras hosts the hub for quantum communication, which covers quantum key distribution over fibre and by satellite. Option C is wrong because the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay hosts the hub for quantum sensing and metrology, the branch that produces atomic clocks, magnetometers and gravimeters. Option D is wrong because the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi hosts the hub for quantum materials and devices, which builds the superconductors, topological materials and single photon sources the other three branches depend on. Learn the four as a set, since questions often swap two of them.

The correct answer is A, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune. Pratyush was commissioned in 2018 under the Ministry of Earth Sciences and is the larger of the two machines the ministry uses for weather and climate modelling. Its companion is Mihir at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, Noida. Together they allowed the forecast model to be run on a much finer grid, which improved monsoon forecasts, cyclone tracks and extreme rainfall warnings.

Option B, the India Meteorological Department at New Delhi, issues the forecasts and warnings but the heavy computation is done on the machines at Pune and Noida. Option C, the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, is an implementing agency of the National Supercomputing Mission and hosts PARAM Pravega, not a weather machine. Option D, the Physical Research Laboratory at Ahmedabad, works on space and atmospheric science under the Department of Space and does not host Pratyush.

The correct answer is A, compressed bio-gas. SATAT stands for Sustainable Alternative Towards Affordable Transportation and was launched in October 2018 by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas; under it the oil marketing companies invite entrepreneurs to set up compressed bio-gas plants from agricultural residue, cattle dung and municipal waste and offer to buy the gas for sale at their retail outlets. Option B is wrong because rooftop solar is promoted through separate schemes of the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy. Option C is wrong because nuclear fuel reprocessing is the business of the Department of Atomic Energy and has no connection with biomass. Option D is wrong because green hydrogen has its own National Green Hydrogen Mission. Compressed bio-gas is over ninety per cent methane.

The correct answer is C, total internal reflection of light. In an optical fibre the glass core has a higher refractive index than the cladding around it, so light that meets the core-cladding boundary at an angle greater than the critical angle is reflected entirely back into the core instead of passing out, and it travels along the fibre in a zig-zag of such reflections with almost no loss. Option A and Option D are wrong because there is no process called total external refraction or total external reflection in optics. Option B is wrong because refraction means the bending of light as it passes into another medium, which is the opposite of what keeps the ray inside; total internal reflection is defined precisely by the ray not being refracted out. This is why the carrier of 5G backhaul is immune to electrical interference.

The correct answer is B, 25 December 2014. Mission Indradhanush was launched on 25 December 2014 to reach children who had received no vaccine or only some of the prescribed doses, and its name refers to the rainbow of vaccines then in the programme. Option A is wrong; 2 October 2014 is the launch date of the Swachh Bharat Mission, a sanitation programme that supports disease control indirectly but is not an immunisation drive. Option C is wrong because no immunisation mission of this name was launched on Independence Day 2015. Option D is wrong, though the year matters, since Intensified Mission Indradhanush followed in 2017 with a district by district and city by city push in the areas of lowest coverage. Remember the pair of Mission Indradhanush in 2014 and its intensified phase in 2017.

The correct answer is B, Indian Space Research Organisation. SAGA-220 was built in 2011 at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, and its name stands for Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture, the figure 220 marking a speed of about 220 teraflops. Its design used graphics processing units rather than ordinary processors alone, which made it comparatively cheap, compact and economical in power. ISRO uses it for problems such as the flow of gases around a launch vehicle.

Option A, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, runs the Anupam series of machines for nuclear science, a separate family. Option C, DRDO, develops defence systems and has its own computing facilities but did not build SAGA-220. Option D, CSIR, is a network of national laboratories and supports high performance computing in several of them, yet the machine named in the question belongs to the space programme.

The correct answer is A, Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley. John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley built the first working transistor at Bell Laboratories in the United States in 1947, and the three shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 for the discovery of the transistor effect; the device replaced the bulky vacuum tube and made all later electronics possible. Option B is wrong because Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce independently developed the integrated circuit in 1958 and 1959, and Gordon Moore gave the industry its famous doubling rule. Option C is wrong because Faraday, Maxwell and Hertz belong to the history of electromagnetism. Option D is wrong because Townes, Basov and Prokhorov won the Nobel Prize of 1964 for work on the maser and the laser.

The correct answer is D, single mode. A fibre-to-the-home connection runs from the operator's equipment to the subscriber's premises over a distance of kilometres, and for such runs single-mode fibre is used: its core is only a few micrometres wide, so light travels along one path, there is no spreading of the pulse from different paths arriving at different times, and both loss and distortion stay very low. Options A and B are wrong because multimode fibre, whether of the graded-index or the step-index kind, has a wider core and carries many paths at once; it suffers modal dispersion and is therefore used only over short distances, such as within a building or a data centre. Option C is wrong because there is no category of fibre called multiaxis. Fibre of this kind is also the backhaul that 5G towers depend on.

The correct answer is B, the Pokhran nuclear tests of 1998. On 11 May 1998 India tested three nuclear devices at Pokhran under Operation Shakti, followed by two more on 13 May, and the day was declared National Technology Day to mark that achievement along with the test flight of the Trishul missile and the first flight of the Hansa aircraft on the same day. Option A is wrong because Aryabhata, India's first satellite, was launched on 19 April 1975. Option C is wrong because the Apsara research reactor became critical on 4 August 1956 and has no day named after it. Option D is wrong because the Atomic Energy Commission was set up in 1948, again with no commemorative day. The trap here is 1974, which candidates often pick because it is the better remembered test.

The correct answer is A, Top500. The Top500 list has been published twice a year since 1993 and ranks the five hundred most powerful computer systems that have been measured, using the LINPACK benchmark, which times a machine while it solves a large system of linear equations. Indian machines have appeared on the list several times; EKA, built at Pune in 2007, was ranked fourth in the world in the list of November that year.

Option B, Green Grid, suggests the separate Green500 ranking, which orders machines by performance for each watt of power consumed rather than by raw speed. Option C, Fortune 500, is a business list of the largest companies by revenue and has nothing to do with computing performance. Option D, Global HPC Index, is an invented name of the kind paper setters add to make the real answer harder to pick out.

The correct answer is B, a biofertiliser. Rhizobium lives in symbiosis in the root nodules of pulses and fixes atmospheric nitrogen into a form the plant can use, which enriches the soil and reduces the need for nitrogen fertiliser. Option A is wrong because biopesticides kill or control pests, and the examples are Bacillus thuringiensis against caterpillars, Trichoderma against soil borne fungi and the nuclear polyhedrosis virus against insect larvae. Option C is wrong because a herbicide kills weeds, and Rhizobium has no such action. Option D is wrong because growth hormones of plants are auxins, gibberellins and cytokinins, which are chemical substances and not bacteria. The other biofertilisers to remember are Azotobacter and Azospirillum, free living nitrogen fixers, Anabaena in Azolla for paddy and mycorrhizal fungi for phosphorus uptake.

The correct answer is C, photo diode. At the receiving end of an optical fibre link the light pulses must be turned back into an electrical signal, and that is the work of a photodiode, a reverse-biased junction in which incident photons generate charge carriers and so a current proportional to the light falling on it; PIN and avalanche photodiodes are the types used, because both respond fast enough for gigabit signalling. Option A is wrong because a light-emitting diode is a source, used at the transmitting end. Option B is wrong because an infrared diode is also an emitter, used in remote controls and short-range links. Option D is wrong because a light-dependent resistor changes its resistance slowly with illumination and is far too sluggish for data; it is used in street-light switches and light meters.

The correct answer is D, one thousand trillion. The ladder of units rises by a factor of a thousand at each step: a megaflop is a million operations in a second, a gigaflop is a billion, a teraflop is a thousand billion, which is one trillion, and a petaflop is a thousand trillion. The next step, the exaflop, is a thousand petaflops. Indian mission machines such as PARAM Ganga and PARAM Pravega are rated in petaflops, which is why the unit matters for this topic.

Option A, one million, is the megaflop, the scale of early machines. Option B, one billion, is the gigaflop; PARAM 10000 of 1998 was rated at about a hundred gigaflops. Option C, one thousand billion, is the teraflop, the unit in which SAGA-220 was rated at 220. Each wrong option is one rung of the same ladder, so the question rewards a candidate who has memorised the order rather than one number.

The correct answer is B, LED. The transmitter of an optical fibre link must be small enough to couple light into a core a few micrometres across, must switch on and off millions or billions of times a second, and must emit in a narrow band of wavelengths; a light-emitting diode meets these conditions, and for long-haul links a laser diode, which is the same family of semiconductor device, is used for its still narrower spectrum. Option A is wrong because an arc lamp is a bulky, broad-spectrum source that cannot be modulated at these speeds. Option C is wrong because a mercury vapour lamp is used for street lighting and in laboratories, not for signalling. Option D is wrong because an incandescent lamp has a glowing filament with great thermal inertia and cannot be switched fast at all.

The correct answer is B, Kolkata. The three PARAM Rudra systems dedicated in 2024 under the National Supercomputing Mission went to the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope near Pune for radio astronomy, the Inter-University Accelerator Centre at New Delhi for research in physics and materials, and the S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences at Kolkata for work in physics, cosmology and earth sciences. Rudra is also the name of the indigenous high performance server developed under the mission, paired with an interconnect named Trinetra.

Option A, Chennai, hosts other research computing but not a PARAM Rudra system of this set. Option C, Hyderabad, is a major centre for information technology and has large commercial data centres, which makes it a tempting choice. Option D, Ahmedabad, hosts the Physical Research Laboratory and space science work, but the third Rudra machine went to Kolkata.