Science & Technology Mixed Quiz: Set 23

The correct answer is B, the Andaman and Nicobar Command, Port Blair. It is the only command in which units of the Army, the Navy and the Air Force work under a single commander-in-chief, an arrangement adopted because the islands lie far from the mainland and guard the approaches to the Malacca Strait. Option A, the Western Naval Command at Mumbai, is a naval command and the home of the carrier fleet on the west coast. Option C, the Eastern Naval Command at Visakhapatnam, is the Navy's command on the east coast. Option D, the Southern Naval Command at Kochi, is the Navy's training command. All three of the latter are naval commands alone, which is the distinction the question tests, and the Strategic Forces Command, which handles nuclear weapons, is a separate tri-service body rather than a geographical command.

The correct answer is B, Cochin Shipyard, Kochi. The indigenous aircraft carrier, commissioned in September 2022 as INS Vikrant, was designed by the Navy's own design organisation and built at Cochin Shipyard in Kerala, which made India one of the few countries able to build a carrier. Option A, Mazagon Dock in Mumbai, builds destroyers of the Project 15 series and the Kalvari class submarines, but not carriers. Option C, Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers in Kolkata, builds frigates and anti-submarine corvettes. Option D, Hindustan Shipyard at Visakhapatnam, works on submarine refits and merchant and support vessels. Note that the name Vikrant was carried earlier by the carrier bought from Britain that served from 1961 and took part in the war of 1971, so the two ships must not be confused.

The correct answer is C, a distributed denial of service attack. A denial of service attack exhausts a server's capacity with a flood of requests, and when the flood is generated from many machines at once, often a botnet of infected computers, it is called distributed. The goal attacked here is availability, the third limb of the CIA triad. Option A is wrong; phishing is a fraudulent message imitating a trusted institution in order to obtain a password or card number. Option B is wrong because SQL injection inserts malicious database commands through an input field to read or alter stored data, which attacks confidentiality and integrity. Option D is wrong since a man-in-the-middle attack intercepts traffic between two parties without either of them knowing. The Cyber Swachhta Kendra exists to clean the botnets used in such attacks.

The correct answer is A, the Information Technology Act, 2000. It gives legal recognition to electronic records and digital signatures, creates the offences of computer-related crime, and was amended substantially in 2008 to add provisions on cyber terrorism, interception and data protection by body corporates. Option B is wrong; the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 governs telegraph and telephone services and the licensing of telecommunications, not computer offences. Option C is wrong because the Indian Evidence Act of 1872 deals with evidence generally, although the IT Act amended it so that electronic records could be admitted as evidence. Option D is wrong since the Companies Act of 2013 regulates companies and their governance. The IT Act was drafted on the model of the UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Commerce.

The correct answer is B, 1930. Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for his work on the scattering of light and for the effect named after him, which he had demonstrated on 28 February 1928; he was the first Asian and the first person from a non-white country to win a Nobel Prize in any of the sciences. Option A, 1913, is the year Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Nobel of any kind to come to India, and candidates who remember only that an Indian won early in the century choose it. Option C, 1968, belongs to Har Gobind Khorana, who shared the prize in Physiology or Medicine for interpreting the genetic code. Option D, 1983, belongs to S. Chandrasekhar, Raman nephew, who shared the Physics prize for his work on the structure and evolution of stars. Keeping the four years 1930, 1968, 1983 and 2009 in order solves most questions in this chapter.

The correct answer is B, Isaac Asimov. Asimov set out the three laws in his science fiction, by which a robot may not harm a human being, must obey the orders given by human beings except where that conflicts with the first law, and must protect itself except where that conflicts with the first two laws; he also coined the word robotics. Option A is wrong because Arthur C. Clarke is remembered for the idea of the geostationary communication satellite and for his own fiction. Option C is wrong because H. G. Wells wrote earlier scientific romances such as The Time Machine. Option D is wrong because Jules Verne wrote of submarines and journeys long before the robot was imagined. The order of the three laws is itself asked, so learn it.

The correct answer is B, Pune in Maharashtra. The array stands at Khodad, near Narayangaon, about eighty kilometres north of Pune, on flat land chosen for its low level of man-made radio interference, and it is operated by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. A, Nainital, is the district that holds Devasthal, where the optical telescopes of ARIES are placed, so the two sites are often interchanged in options. C has no major radio array of this kind, although it hosts other scientific institutions. D is the home of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, which builds launch vehicles and is not an observatory. Remember GMRT with metre wavelengths and with Maharashtra. The array works in the band of about 100 to 1,500 megahertz, where pulsars and hydrogen clouds are studied.

The correct answer is C, 2023. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation Act was passed by Parliament in 2023 to create a single apex body for funding research across the sciences, including in state universities and colleges, which earlier received very little central research money. The same Act dissolved the Science and Engineering Research Board and transferred its work to the new foundation. Option A, 2018, is the year the Prime Minister's Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council was constituted and the year the Prime Minister's Research Fellowship began, not the year of the foundation. Option B, 2020, is the year in which a fifth science, technology and innovation policy was drafted and put out for consultation, which is why it is an attractive wrong choice. Option D, 2024, is the year the government gathered its science awards into the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar, not the year of this Act.

The correct answer is C, Admiral Gorshkov. INS Vikramaditya is a modified Kiev class ship of Soviet origin, formerly named Admiral Gorshkov, which was rebuilt in Russia and handed over to India, entering service as an aircraft carrier operating MiG-29K fighters. Option A, HMS Hercules, was the British ship that India completed and commissioned in 1961 as the first INS Vikrant. Option B, HMS Hermes, was the British carrier that served India as INS Viraat until 2017. Option D is not the name of any Indian carrier. The full line of Indian carriers is therefore the first Vikrant from 1961, Viraat, Vikramaditya and the new indigenous Vikrant of 2022, and papers often ask which of them was built in India, the answer being only the last.

The correct answer is B, Sumio Iijima. The Japanese physicist Sumio Iijima, then at the NEC laboratory, reported multi walled carbon nanotubes in 1991 using a transmission electron microscope, and the date and the name are the facts asked. A nanotube is a sheet of graphene rolled into a cylinder, is about a hundred times stronger than steel for the same weight, and conducts heat and electricity very well. Option A is wrong because Harold Kroto was part of the fullerene discovery of 1985 and shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996. Option C is wrong because Andre Geim isolated graphene in 2004 with Konstantin Novoselov at Manchester and shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. Option D is wrong because Richard Smalley too belongs to the fullerene team of 1985, a related but earlier discovery.

The correct answer is B, Data Principal. The Act of 2023 calls the individual to whom the personal data relates the Data Principal, and gives that person rights of access, correction, erasure and grievance redressal. Option A is wrong and is the commonest confusion: a Data Fiduciary is the person or entity that decides the purpose and means of processing the data, and it carries the duties under the Act. Option C is wrong because a Consent Manager is an entity registered with the Data Protection Board through which a Data Principal can give, manage and withdraw consent. Option D is wrong since a Data Processor processes data on behalf of a Data Fiduciary. The Act follows the Puttaswamy judgment of 2017 and the report of the Justice B. N. Srikrishna Committee.

The correct answer is C, China. Micius was launched in 2016 and was used to demonstrate quantum key distribution between a satellite and ground stations, and entanglement distribution over distances far greater than optical fibre allows, since fibre loses photons rapidly over long runs. The satellite is named after an ancient Chinese philosopher. Option A is wrong because the United States has run major quantum programmes in computing and in post quantum cryptography but did not launch this satellite. Option B is wrong because Russia has no comparable dedicated quantum satellite to its name. Option D is wrong because Japan has done notable work on quantum communication over fibre but was not first to orbit. India's own target under the National Quantum Mission is satellite based secure quantum communication over 2,000 kilometres between ground stations.

The correct answer is A, the Raman effect. C. V. Raman announced on 28 February 1928 that when a beam of light passes through a transparent medium a small fraction of it is scattered with a shifted wavelength, which carries information about the molecules of the medium; the Government of India fixed National Science Day on that anniversary in 1986. Option B is wrong; the Chandrasekhar limit, the greatest mass a white dwarf can hold, is a calculation of the early nineteen thirties and no national day is attached to it. Option C is wrong; Meghnad Saha ionisation equation, which explains the spectra of stars from their temperature and pressure, has no day of its own, important though the work is. Option D is wrong; the statistics worked out by Satyendra Nath Bose and extended by Einstein gave the boson its name but is likewise not marked by a day. The other days to remember are 22 December and 15 September.

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 A, thirty dishes of forty-five metres each. Fourteen of them stand close together in a central square of about one kilometre, and the remaining sixteen are spread along three arms in a Y shape stretching some twenty-five kilometres, which gives the array both the sensitivity of a filled aperture and the resolution of a wide one. The dishes are built of a light wire mesh stretched over a frame of rope trusses, a design that made them cheap enough to build in India. B understates both numbers. C simply swaps the two figures, which is exactly the trap an examiner wants a hurried candidate to fall into. D matches no Indian facility at all. Fourteen dishes in the central square and sixteen on the three arms is the split worth carrying into the exam hall.

The correct answer is A, a half-humanoid robot. Vyommitra, a name built from vyom for sky and mitra for friend, is a half-humanoid robot developed by ISRO to fly on an uncrewed Gaganyaan mission. It has a head, arms and a torso but no legs, and it is meant to sit in the crew seat, monitor cabin parameters, operate switches and report back, so that the systems a human crew will depend on are tested first.

Option B is wrong because the cryogenic engines of the LVM3 have their own designations. Option C is wrong because mission control works from the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network and the Mission Control Centre, not from anything called Vyommitra. Option D is wrong because the Indian crew's spacesuit is a separate development and carries no such name. Questions on this topic usually pair Vyommitra with the uncrewed test flights.

The correct answer is C, the Visakhapatnam class. Project 15B produced the Visakhapatnam class of guided missile destroyers, built at Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders in Mumbai, which includes INS Visakhapatnam, INS Mormugao and INS Imphal. Option A, the Delhi class, came from the original Project 15, the first destroyers designed in India. Option B, the Kolkata class, came from Project 15A, the step between the Delhi and Visakhapatnam classes. Option D, the Shivalik class, is not a destroyer class at all but the frigates of Project 17, which were followed by the Nilgiri class frigates of Project 17A. The numbering is worth learning as a ladder, Project 15, 15A and 15B for destroyers and Project 17 and 17A for frigates, with Project 28 for the Kamorta class anti-submarine corvettes.

The correct answer is A, phishing. Phishing uses a message that looks as though it comes from a trusted institution, so that the reader voluntarily gives up credentials; the same fraud carried out by telephone call is called vishing and by text message smishing. Option B is wrong; ransomware is malicious software that encrypts the victim's files and demands a payment for the key, so it does not depend on the victim disclosing a password. Option C is wrong because spoofing is the faking of an address or identifier at the technical level, and while a phishing email often spoofs a sender address, the named offence here is the deception of the reader. Option D is wrong since a zero-day exploit attacks a software flaw for which no patch yet exists, which is a technical weakness rather than a trick played on a person.

The correct answer is B, Vikram Sarabhai. He founded the Physical Research Laboratory at Ahmedabad in 1947, convinced the government to set up the Indian National Committee for Space Research in 1962, picked Thumba near the magnetic equator for the first sounding rocket launch in November 1963, and led the organisation that became the Indian Space Research Organisation in 1969; the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre at Thiruvananthapuram is named after him. Option A is wrong; Homi Bhabha is the father of the Indian nuclear programme, and swapping the two men is the commonest error in this chapter, though Bhabha did support the early space work. Option C is wrong; A. P. J. Abdul Kalam is the Missile Man, who directed the Satellite Launch Vehicle and the guided missile programme. Option D is wrong; Satish Dhawan headed ISRO from 1972 and the launch centre at Sriharikota is named after him, but he did not found the programme.

The correct answer is B, the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences, an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology at Nainital that grew out of the old Uttar Pradesh State Observatory. The telescope was built in collaboration with Belgium and activated in 2016 on the Devasthal ridge at about 2,450 metres, and the same site carries a 1.3 metre fast optical telescope and the four metre liquid mirror telescope. A runs Kavalur, Hanle and Kodaikanal, not Devasthal. C of Ahmedabad runs the Udaipur Solar Observatory and the infrared telescopes on Mount Abu. D at Bengaluru runs the radioheliograph at Gauribidanur, so each option names a real institute with a different set of telescopes. The same institute ran the older telescopes at Manora Peak in Nainital before the Devasthal ridge was developed.