Science & Technology Mixed Quiz: Set 27

The correct answer is B, Nagpur. The Central Agmark Laboratory at Nagpur is the apex laboratory for the Agmark scheme; it analyses samples, settles disputed results and keeps the standard methods, while regional Agmark laboratories do routine testing elsewhere in the country. Option A is wrong, and it is the trap here, because Faridabad is the headquarters of the Directorate of Marketing and Inspection, the office that administers Agmark; the headquarters and the laboratory are at different places. Option C is wrong because Pune has the National Film Archive of India and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, not the Agmark laboratory. Option D is wrong because Lucknow has the Indian Institute of Toxicology Research and the National Botanical Research Institute, which do other work. Remember the pair: Directorate at Faridabad, laboratory at Nagpur.

The correct answer is B, the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution. The Bureau works under the Department of Consumer Affairs in that Ministry, and the Union Minister in charge is the President of the Bureau, because standards and certification exist to protect the consumer. Option A is wrong because the Ministry of Commerce and Industry handles trade, the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade and intellectual property, not standardisation. Option C is wrong because the Ministry of Science and Technology runs research councils such as the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. Option D is wrong because the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises promotes small industry; it may help a unit obtain certification, but it neither sets standards nor awards the ISI mark.

The correct answer is B, Satoshi Nakamoto. The paper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was circulated in 2008 under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym whose owner has never been established, and it set out how a chain of hashed blocks and proof of work could prevent double spending without any trusted third party. The first block of the chain was mined in January 2009. Option A is wrong because Vitalik Buterin proposed Ethereum in 2013, five years later, and Ethereum is a different network built for smart contracts. Option C is wrong because Nick Szabo coined the term smart contract in the 1990s and designed an earlier scheme called bit gold, but did not write this paper. Option D is wrong because Ralph Merkle devised the Merkle tree, the hashing structure that bitcoin uses inside a block, decades before bitcoin existed.

The correct answer is A, Chuck Hull. He invented stereolithography in the mid-1980s, in which a laser hardens liquid photopolymer resin point by point, and in doing so built the first working 3D printer; he also went on to found a company to sell the machines. Option B is wrong because Jaron Lanier is associated with virtual reality, a phrase he popularised, and not with printing. Option C is wrong because Ivan Sutherland built the first head-mounted display in 1968, the device nicknamed the Sword of Damocles, which again belongs to the reality technologies. Option D is wrong because Neal Stephenson is a novelist who coined the word metaverse in Snow Crash in 1992. All four names belong to this topic, which is why they are set together.

The correct answer is B, Ahmedabad. The Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre, IN-SPACe, is an autonomous body under the Department of Space with its headquarters at Ahmedabad in Gujarat, the city where India's space programme itself began at the Physical Research Laboratory founded by Vikram Sarabhai. IN-SPACe authorises and supervises the space activities of private companies and lets them use ISRO's facilities. Option A is wrong because Bengaluru is the headquarters of ISRO itself, of Antrix Corporation and of NewSpace India Limited, which is why it is the common wrong choice here. Option C is wrong because Hyderabad is the home of the launch-vehicle start-up Skyroot Aerospace and of ISRO's Nuclear Fuel Complex neighbours, not of IN-SPACe. Option D is wrong because Thiruvananthapuram hosts the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, where launch vehicles are developed.

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 C, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. The strategy was released by that ministry in 2022 to build a domestic ecosystem for additive manufacturing, covering machines, materials and software, the creation of Indian intellectual property and the skilling of workers, in line with the Make in India and self-reliance programmes. Option A is wrong because the Ministry of Heavy Industries handles capital goods and the automobile sector, including schemes for electric vehicles, but not this strategy. Option B is wrong because the Ministry of Science and Technology funds research through its departments but did not issue this document. Option D is wrong because the Ministry of Commerce and Industry negotiates trade agreements and runs export promotion, a separate mandate altogether. The strategy also placed additive manufacturing alongside the ministry s other technology missions, which is why questions pair it with electronics rather than with heavy engineering.

The correct answer is A, Dassault Aviation of France. Rafale is a twin-engine multirole fighter made by Dassault Aviation, the same French company that made the Mirage 2000 flown by India since the 1980s, and the first Indian Rafale squadron was raised at Ambala. Option B, Boeing of the United States, supplies India the Apache attack helicopter, the Chinook heavy-lift helicopter, the C-17 Globemaster III transport and the P-8I maritime patrol aircraft. Option C, Sukhoi of Russia, designed the Su-30MKI, which Hindustan Aeronautics Limited assembles at Nashik. Option D, Saab of Sweden, makes the Gripen, which India does not operate. Keeping the country with the maker, France for Dassault, the United States for Boeing and Russia for Sukhoi and Mikoyan, answers most questions of this family, because papers ask for the country as often as for the company.

The correct answer is B, non-vegetarian food. Under the food labelling rules a non-vegetarian article must carry a brown filled triangle within a brown square outline, while a vegetarian article carries a green filled circle within a green square outline. The symbol must appear in contrast to the background and close to the brand name, along with the fourteen-digit FSSAI licence or registration number. Option A is wrong because the vegetarian symbol is a green circle, not a brown triangle, and candidates lose the mark by swapping the shapes. Option C is wrong because organic food is certified separately under the Jaivik Bharat identity and the India Organic mark, which is a different label. Option D is wrong because added preservatives, colours and flavours are declared in the ingredient list in words and not through this symbol.

The correct answer is B, the National Technical Research Organisation. The NCIIPC was designated under section 70A of the IT Act to protect critical information infrastructure, meaning computer resources whose incapacitation would have a debilitating effect on national security, the economy, public health or safety, and it works as a unit of the NTRO. Option A is wrong; the Reserve Bank regulates the financial sector's own cyber resilience but does not house the NCIIPC. Option C is wrong, although the Ministry of Home Affairs runs the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre and the national cybercrime reporting portal, which is why it is a tempting choice. Option D is wrong because the National Informatics Centre provides information technology services to government departments rather than protecting critical infrastructure.

The correct answer is B, SHA-256. Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 hash function, part of the Secure Hash Algorithm family, which turns an input of any length into a fixed output of two hundred and fifty-six bits. The function is one-way, so the input cannot be derived from the output, and it is collision resistant, so two different inputs practically never give the same hash; mining consists of searching for a nonce that makes the block hash fall below a target value. Option A is wrong because MD5 is an older and now broken hash function, no longer considered secure. Option C is wrong because AES is a symmetric encryption cipher, not a hash function, and encryption is reversible with the key while a hash is not. Option D is wrong because RSA is a public key encryption and signature algorithm; bitcoin signs transactions with elliptic curve cryptography, not RSA.

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 B, 2019. NewSpace India Limited was incorporated in 2019 as a public sector undertaking under the Department of Space, with its registered office at Bengaluru. It runs demand-driven missions, owns and operates satellites, has launch vehicles built by Indian industry and transfers ISRO's technology to private firms. Option A is wrong because 1992 is the year Antrix Corporation, the older commercial arm of the department, was set up; a question often pairs the two years to see whether a candidate can tell the two companies apart. Option C is wrong because 2020 is the year the space sector reforms were announced and IN-SPACe was created. Option D is wrong because 2023 is the year the Indian Space Policy was approved, which defined the roles of ISRO, NSIL and IN-SPACe.

The correct answer is A, a pilotless target aircraft. Lakshya was developed by the Aeronautical Development Establishment of the DRDO to be flown as a target so that gun crews and missile units can practise against a realistic moving aircraft, and it is recovered by parachute. Option B is wrong because India's passenger aircraft programmes are of a different line altogether, such as the Saras light transport aircraft. Option C is wrong because the armed helicopters in Indian service are the Rudra and the Light Combat Helicopter, which carry crew. Option D is wrong because the reusable launch vehicle is an ISRO programme for space access. Along with Lakshya, remember Nishant, Netra and TAPAS BH, which was earlier called Rustom II. Note also that the Ghatak is the stealth combat drone of the same organisation, still under development.

The correct answer is B, a virtual replica of a physical asset that is fed live data from sensors on the original. Because the model receives readings from the real machine, building or city as it works, it behaves as the real asset behaves, and engineers can test a change, foresee a failure or plan maintenance on the model without disturbing the original. Option A is wrong because keeping identical copies of a file on different servers is simply backup or mirroring. Option C is wrong because two headsets sharing an environment describes multi-user virtual reality, not a twin. Option D is wrong because printing two objects at once is just a matter of a larger build plate and has no connection with the concept.

The correct answer is B, the Indian Research Fund Association. The body was founded in 1911 as the Indian Research Fund Association to sponsor and coordinate medical research in the country, and it was renamed the Indian Council of Medical Research in 1949 after independence. It works under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare with its headquarters in New Delhi. Option A is the classic trap, because the Indian Council of Agricultural Research really did begin in 1929 as the Imperial Council of Agricultural Research; the medical body carried a different name. Option C is an invented name and belongs to no Indian institution. Option D is wrong because the All India Institute of Medical Sciences is a teaching hospital and institute of national importance created by an Act of 1956, not the research council in question.

The correct answer is B, twenty-one million. The bitcoin protocol fixes the total supply at twenty-one million coins. New coins enter circulation only as the reward paid to whoever adds a block, and that reward is halved every two hundred and ten thousand blocks, which works out to roughly every four years, so issuance falls geometrically towards zero. This built-in scarcity is why bitcoin is often described as deflationary by design. Option A is wrong because one crore, that is ten million, is below the protocol limit. Option C is wrong because one hundred million is the number of the smallest units, called satoshis, in a single bitcoin, not the number of bitcoins. Option D is wrong because an unlimited supply is the feature of ordinary fiat currency, which a central bank can issue at will, and the fixed cap is precisely the contrast bitcoin was designed to draw.

The correct answer is B, Vikram-S. Vikram-S was built by Skyroot Aerospace of Hyderabad and flew a sub-orbital mission from Sriharikota in November 2022 under the name Mission Prarambh, which means beginning. It was the first rocket designed and built by an Indian private company to fly, and it is named after Vikram Sarabhai. Option A is wrong because Agnibaan, of Agnikul Cosmos, flew later, in 2024, although its SOrTeD flight set its own record for a single-piece three-dimensionally printed engine. Option C is wrong because the Small Satellite Launch Vehicle is ISRO's own rocket and its first developmental flight was in 2022 from Sriharikota. Option D is wrong because Rohini sounding rockets are ISRO's own series, flown since the early years of the programme.

The correct answer is C, the PS4 engine, the fourth stage of the PSLV. The space agency made the engine by fusing metal powder with a laser and tested it successfully, reducing the number of separate parts in the engine from fourteen to a single printed piece and cutting both the material used and the time taken to build it. Option A is wrong because the Vikas engine is a liquid engine used in the lower stages of several Indian launch vehicles and was not the one printed. Option B is wrong because the CE-20 is the indigenous cryogenic upper-stage engine, developed by conventional means. Option D is wrong because the S200 is a very large solid-propellant booster, and solid boosters are cast rather than printed.

The correct answer is C, Proof of Work. In proof of work, the computers called miners compete to find a nonce that makes the hash of the proposed block meet a difficulty target. The search requires enormous numbers of trials and therefore real electricity, which is the cost that makes rewriting the chain uneconomic; the winner adds the block and receives the block reward and the fees. Option A is wrong because proof of stake, in which validators are chosen in proportion to the coins they lock up, is used by Ethereum after its change of mechanism in 2022 and by many newer chains, but not by bitcoin. Option B is wrong because proof of authority relies on a small set of identified validators and suits private or consortium chains. Option D is wrong because practical Byzantine fault tolerance is a voting-based mechanism used in permissioned systems such as Hyperledger Fabric.