Which two chemicals has India’s foodgrain storage relied on for post-harvest pest control?

The correct answer is ICAR-CIPHET, Ludhiana, the Central Institute of Post-Harvest Engineering and Technology, which will carry out the two-year Phase-I of the project on alternatives to chemical fumigation in wheat and rice. Option A is wrong because the Indian Agricultural Research Institute works on crop improvement and allied research and was not named as the implementing body here. Option C is wrong because, although wheat is central to the trials, the institute at Karnal does not figure in this agreement, which was signed with a post-harvest engineering institute precisely because storage and fumigation are post-harvest problems. Option D is wrong because the Central Warehousing Corporation appears only as one of the warehousing systems where bagged grain will be treated during a trial, not as the implementing institute. The MoU itself was signed on 30 September 2026.

The correct answer is a one-year multi-location trial across agro-climatic zones. Phase-II follows the two-year Phase-I pilot and is designed to test the methods in varied conditions so that region-specific Standard Operating Procedures can be established. Option A is wrong because the two-year, single-institute work describes Phase-I, which ICAR-CIPHET at Ludhiana will run, and not the phase that comes after it. Option C is wrong because no immediate nationwide rollout was announced; the whole point of a phased design is to validate the gases first, including nitrogen above 99 per cent purity in metal silos. Option D is wrong because the project is a field research programme on alternative technologies, aimed at scalable and sustainable substitutes, rather than a paper review of the existing rules.

The correct answer is 2019. The measurement rests on 94 nights of observation data collected in that year, which is only a small fraction of everything the telescope has recorded since operations began. Options A, C and D are nearby years offered as distractors and do not match the announcement. Two related details are worth carrying alongside the year. First, the finding was not immediate: new analysis and processing techniques were needed to pull the faint signal out of the noise, and the team spent more than a year testing it before publishing in The Astrophysical Journal. Second, researchers now have nearly seven years of observations and are extending the work to when the universe was about three billion years old.

The correct answer is Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment. CHIME is an interferometric radio telescope in Canada, built to map the distribution of hydrogen gas in the early universe so that astronomers can calculate how the universe expands and thereby study dark energy. Options A, C and D are invented expansions assembled from similar astronomical vocabulary, which is the usual way such distractors are framed. Note that the first letter stands for the country that conceived, built and funded the instrument, a point its principal investigator emphasised. Candidates should also register that CHIME works at radio wavelengths and has no moving parts, scanning the sky as it drifts overhead, which is what lets it deliver a daily view of the radio sky.

The correct answer is the Raman Research Institute. The study that reported the first standalone detection included CHIME collaborators at RRI, an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology, and its associate professor Saurabh Singh is among the co-authors quoted on the result. Options A, B and D name other well known Indian research bodies working in astronomy, space and fundamental physics, and they are placed here precisely because a candidate who remembers only that an Indian institute was involved may pick any of them. The safe approach is to link the institute to its parent department as well, since questions often ask which ministry or department the institute falls under, and here the answer is the Department of Science and Technology.