Science & Technology Mixed Quiz: Set 24

The correct answer is A, Globemaster III. The C-17 Globemaster III, made by Boeing, is the heaviest transport aircraft of the Indian Air Force and is used to move troops, vehicles and relief material over long distances, including to high-altitude airfields. Option B, Super Hercules, is the name of the C-130J, a smaller transport used chiefly for special operations and short landing strips. Option C, Gajraj, is the service name of the Russian IL-76 transport, from which the Phalcon airborne early warning radar is also flown. Option D, Netra, is not a transport at all but the airborne early warning and control system developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation on an Embraer aircraft. Mid-air refuelling is done by the IL-78, which is a tanker version of the same Russian aircraft.

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, 1 July 2015. Digital India was launched on that date with three stated aims: digital infrastructure as a utility for every citizen, governance and services on demand, and the digital empowerment of citizens; BharatNet, Common Service Centres, DigiLocker and the UMANG application all sit within it. Option A is wrong; 15 August 2014 is the date of the announcement of the Jan Dhan Yojana from the Red Fort, which was launched later that month. Option C is wrong and corresponds to no launch, although the Unified Payments Interface did come in 2016. Option D is wrong because 2 October 2014 is the launch of the Swachh Bharat Mission, chosen for Gandhi's birth anniversary, which makes it a plausible date for anyone guessing from the pattern of government launches.

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 B, S. Chandrasekhar. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar showed, while still in his twenties, that a white dwarf heavier than about 1.44 times the mass of the Sun cannot be held up by the pressure of its degenerate electrons and must collapse further; the figure is called the Chandrasekhar limit, it underlies the modern account of neutron stars and black holes, and it brought him a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983. The Chandra X-ray Observatory is named for him. Option A is wrong; Meghnad Saha gave the ionisation equation that lets astronomers read the temperature of a star from its spectrum, a different and earlier contribution. Option C is wrong; Satyendra Nath Bose gave the quantum statistics after which bosons are named. Option D is wrong; Jagadish Chandra Bose worked on plant physiology and radio waves and had nothing to do with stellar structure, but the shared surname makes him a standard distractor.

The correct answer is A, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited. Tejas is a single-engine multirole fighter designed by the Aeronautical Development Agency and manufactured by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, the public sector company that also builds the Dhruv helicopter, the Prachand light combat helicopter and the Su-30MKI under licence at Nashik. Option B, Bharat Electronics Limited, makes radars, communication sets and electronic warfare equipment, not airframes. Option C, Bharat Dynamics Limited, makes missiles and torpedoes such as the Akash and the Nag. Option D, Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders, builds warships and submarines. The Indian attempt at a fighter engine for Tejas, the Kaveri, belongs to the Gas Turbine Research Establishment of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, while the engine flown on the aircraft today is imported. Learn the trio together: the agency designs, HAL builds and the DRDO laboratories supply the systems.

The correct answer is A, Hanle in Ladakh. The Indian Astronomical Observatory sits there at about 4,500 metres in a cold desert, one of the highest and driest observing sites in the world, where very little water vapour and almost no artificial light make the sky exceptionally clear and dark. The telescope is operated by remote command over a satellite link from the centre at Hosakote near Bengaluru, which saves observers the journey. B holds the infrared telescopes of the Physical Research Laboratory. C holds the 2.34 metre Vainu Bappu Telescope of the same institute that runs Hanle, which is why the two are confused. D is the site of the GMRT radio array and has no optical telescope. The same site also carries the high altitude gamma ray telescopes of the atomic energy establishment, which need equally clear air.

The correct answer is B, Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. These are the three goals of information security: only authorised persons should read the data, the data must not be altered without authority, and the system must work when it is needed. Option A is wrong; control and access are mechanisms rather than the named goals of the triad. Option C is wrong because cryptography, identity and authentication are tools used to achieve the three goals, not the goals themselves, and this option is attractive to anyone who remembers the technical vocabulary instead of the framework. Option D is wrong since compliance, inspection and audit belong to governance and assurance work. A denial of service attack is a good illustration, because it attacks availability alone while leaving confidentiality and integrity untouched.

The correct answer is B, the interpretation of the genetic code. Khorana shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 with Robert Holley and Marshall Nirenberg for showing how the sequence of nucleotides in nucleic acids specifies the amino acids of a protein; he later synthesised the first artificial gene, a landmark in molecular biology. He was born at Raipur in undivided Punjab and later became a citizen of the United States. Option A is wrong; alkaloid chemistry is associated with Asima Chatterjee, who worked on anti-epileptic and anti-malarial compounds. Option C is wrong; the structure and function of the ribosome brought Venkatraman Ramakrishnan a share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009, four decades later. Option D is wrong; plant physiology is the field of Jagadish Chandra Bose, who built the crescograph to measure growth and showed that plants respond to stimuli.

The correct answer is A, up to 250 grams. The rules class drones by all up weight, which includes the battery and the payload, and the nano class is the smallest, up to 250 grams, which is why the lightest toy and camera drones fall in it and are treated most lightly by the law. Option B is wrong because above 250 grams and up to 2 kilograms is the micro class. Option C is wrong because above 2 kilograms and up to 25 kilograms is the small class, which is the usual size for survey and spraying drones. Option D is wrong because above 25 kilograms and up to 150 kilograms is the medium class, and anything heavier is large. Learn the ladder as 250 grams, 2, 25 and 150 kilograms.

The correct answer is B, the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory in the Palani hills of Tamil Nadu, set up in 1899 when solar work was moved from the old Madras Observatory to a hill station with clearer air. It is now part of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, and its digitised archive of daily photographs of the solar disc, sunspots and the chromosphere is among the longest continuous records of the Sun anywhere, which makes it valuable for the study of long solar cycles. A is a night-time optical observatory for stars and galaxies. C watches the Sun but at radio frequencies and was set up much later. D is an optical site of the twenty-first century with no solar programme of this kind. Its sunspot drawings and spectroheliograms are now used to reconstruct the solar activity of the past hundred years.

The correct answer is A, 2008. The Science and Engineering Research Board Act was passed in 2008 and the board was constituted as a statutory body under the Department of Science and Technology to fund basic research in the sciences and engineering through competitive grants to individual scientists. Its functions passed to the Anusandhan National Research Foundation under the Act of 2023. Option B, 2010, is wrong; it is the first year of the Decade of Innovation declared for 2010 to 2020. Option C, 2013, is wrong but tempting because that is the year of the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy, a policy document and not a statute creating a funding body. Option D, 2016, is wrong; that is the year the Atal Innovation Mission was set up under NITI Aayog to run Atal Tinkering Labs and support start-ups, a separate initiative altogether.

The correct answer is A, Jagadish Chandra Bose. He designed the crescograph, which magnifies the growth of a plant many thousand times so that it can be recorded, and used it and related instruments to argue that plants respond to light, heat, touch and other stimuli much as animals do. He also did pioneering work on very short radio waves before Marconi transatlantic experiments, and he founded the Bose Institute at Kolkata in 1917. Option B is wrong; Prafulla Chandra Ray, the father of Indian chemistry, discovered mercurous nitrite in 1896 and founded Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works. Option C is wrong; Birbal Sahni was a palaeobotanist who studied the fossil plants of India, and the institute at Lucknow carries his name. Option D is wrong; Salim Ali, the birdman of India, conducted the systematic bird surveys of the subcontinent and wrote The Book of Indian Birds.

The correct answer is C, 2010. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for groundbreaking experiments on graphene, the single atom thick sheet of carbon they had lifted from graphite with ordinary adhesive tape. Option A is wrong because 2004 is the year of the isolation itself, and the gap between the discovery and the prize is the trap in this question. Option B is wrong because the Nobel Prize in Physics of 2008 went to work on broken symmetry and quarks, with no connection to graphene. Option D is wrong because the Nobel Prize in Physics of 2014 honoured the blue light emitting diode, a different materials achievement. Graphene is the strongest material yet tested, an excellent conductor and almost completely transparent.

The correct answer is A, Kavalur in Tamil Nadu. In 1977 astronomers watched Uranus pass in front of a distant star from the observatory in the Javadi hills, and the dips in the star's light before and after the planet itself crossed showed that rings surround Uranus. The site later received the 2.34 metre telescope named after Vainu Bappu, who founded the observatory, and it belongs to the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. B is a solar observatory and could not have made such an observation. C was developed as an observing site only in the closing years of the twentieth century, two decades after the event. D hosts optical telescopes but had no part in this particular discovery. The method used, watching a star dim as a body passes in front of it, is called occultation.

The correct answer is B, 23 August 2023. The Vikram lander of Chandrayaan-3 touched down near the south polar region of the Moon on 23 August 2023, making India the fourth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon and the first to do so near the lunar south pole. The Pragyan rover then rolled out and worked through one lunar day. The landing site was named Shiv Shakti Point and 23 August is now observed in India as National Space Day.

Option A, 14 July 2023, is the launch date of Chandrayaan-3 aboard the LVM3-M4 vehicle. Option C, 2 September 2023, is the launch date of Aditya-L1, the solar mission that followed soon after. Option D, 6 January 2024, is the date on which Aditya-L1 was inserted into its halo orbit around the Lagrange point L1. All three are real dates from the same period, which is what makes the question tricky.

The correct answer is C, Dr. Lalji Singh. He developed the probe that made DNA fingerprinting practicable in India at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology at Hyderabad, where the first Indian case used the technique in 1988; he later founded the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics and served as Vice-Chancellor of Banaras Hindu University. Option A is wrong; no scientist of that name is associated with the technique, and the option is included only to fill the paper. Option B is wrong; M. S. Swaminathan is the father of the Green Revolution in India, who introduced the high-yielding wheat varieties of the nineteen sixties and won the first World Food Prize in 1987. Option D is wrong; C. N. R. Rao is a chemist known for his work on solid state and materials chemistry and was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 2014. The technique itself was devised in Britain by Alec Jeffreys in 1984.

The correct answer is C, 2015. AstroSat was launched on 28 September 2015 by PSLV-C30 from Sriharikota into a near equatorial low Earth orbit. It carries five payloads, including the Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope, the Soft X-ray Telescope, the Large Area X-ray Proportional Counter, the Cadmium Zinc Telluride Imager and a scanning sky monitor, so that the same source can be studied in the ultraviolet and in both soft and hard X-rays at once, which few observatories can do. A is the year of Chandrayaan-1, the first lunar mission, and B of the Mars Orbiter Mission, both of which candidates confuse with AstroSat because all three are firsts. D belongs to Chandrayaan-2. Its scanning sky monitor also looks for sources that brighten suddenly, such as X-ray binaries in outburst.

The correct answer is A, M. Visvesvaraya. Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya was born on 15 September 1861, served as Diwan of Mysore, designed the automatic sluice gates used at the Krishna Raja Sagara dam and the block system of irrigation, planned flood protection for Hyderabad, and received the Bharat Ratna in 1955; the day is observed as Engineer Day in his memory. Option B is wrong; A. P. J. Abdul Kalam was born on 15 October, and that date is observed as World Students Day and in India as a reading day, so the two anniversaries are only a month apart and are deliberately offered together. Option C is wrong; Homi Bhabha was born on 30 October and no national day is attached to him. Option D is wrong; Satish Dhawan, who headed ISRO through the nineteen seventies and eighties, was born in September but has no day named for him; the Sriharikota range carries his name instead.

The correct answer is B, a halo orbit around the Lagrange point L1 of the Sun-Earth system, about 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth in the direction of the Sun. At that point the gravitational pulls of the Sun and the Earth combine with the orbital motion so that a spacecraft keeps station with the Earth, and from there the Sun can be watched continuously without any eclipse or occultation. The observatory was launched on 2 September 2023 and carries seven payloads, chief among them the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph for the solar corona. A is where remote sensing satellites go. C is the orbit of the Chandrayaan missions. D describes no Indian mission. Six other payloads measure the solar wind, energetic particles and the magnetic field around the spacecraft.