General Tests: Mock Test - 3 - CUET MCQ

As per the data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) crossed the 500-crore mark in terms of volume.
In March this year, UPI was close to touching the ₹10-lakh crore milestone in value terms in March this year. There were around 315 banks live on the UPI platform by March this year.

The Indian government appointed senior Indian Foreign Service officer Vinay Mohan Kwatra as the new Foreign Secretary.
The 1988-batch IFS officer is currently serving as Ambassador in Kathmandu since January 2020. He worked in Prime Minister’s Office from 2015 to 2017 and had served as India’s ambassador to France. Vinay Kwatra will replace the incumbent Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla.

‘Global Collaboration Advanced Vaccinology Training’ meeting was recently held in Geneva. In the meeting, the need for a basic vaccinology training module for healthcare personnel across the world was discussed.
India was represented by Dr N.K. Arora, head of the Covid-19 working group in the National Immunization Technical Advisory Group (NTAGI). The Group makes vaccine recommendations on the basis of disease burden, efficacy and cost effectiveness.

United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) recently released the ‘State of World Population: Seeing the Unseen: The case for action in the neglected crisis of unintended pregnancy’ Report.
As per the report, nearly half of all pregnancies, totalling 121 million each year throughout the world, are unintended. Globally, an estimated 257 million women who want to avoid pregnancy are not using safe and modern methods of contraception.

As per the ‘Hurun Richest Self-Made Women in the World 2022’, there are 124 self-made women billionaires in the world now, down 6 from last year.
Three Indian women – Falguni Nayar of Nykaa, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw of Biocon and Radha Vembu of Zoho feature in the latest Hurun list of women self-made billionaires. Falguni Nayar overtook long-time India’s number one woman billionaire Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw to become the richest self-made woman in India.

Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav launched “Prakriti”, mascot that spreads awareness about small changes in life that can curb plastic pollution.
It also highlights various green initiatives taken by Ministry of Environment, Forest & Climate Change and Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) to ensure effective Plastic Waste Management (PWM) in the country.

The Chief Justice of India N.V. Ramana launched digital platform ‘Fast and Secured Transmission of Electronic Records’ (FASTER).
The platform would be used by the court officials to instantly to send e-copies of the orders to intended parties, through a secured electronic communication channel. It covers all types of orders of the court.

Arunachal Pradesh signed a pact with WWF India to develop the State Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (SBSAP).
The SBSAP will be aligned with the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework and Pakke Declaration. The state cabinet adopted the ‘Pakke Tiger Reserve 2047 Declaration on Climate Change Resilient and Responsive Arunachal Pradesh’, last year.

The 2022 update of the World Health Organization’s air quality database highlights that 99 per cent of the world population breathes air that exceeds WHO air quality limits.
The update also introduces ground measurements of annual mean concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), which is a common urban pollutant. As of now, over 6,000 cities in 117 countries are monitoring air quality.

SEBI Chairperson Madhabi Puri Buch launched the ‘Manthan’, a six-week long ideathon, in association with various institutions including BSE, NSE, NSDL, CDSL, KFintech, CAMS, LinkInTime and MCX.
It will facilitate the creation of a set of ideas and innovative solutions related to the securities market in India.

The government has launched a new broadcast services website to ensure faster filing and processing of applications for broadcast licenses, permissions and registrations.
The ‘Broadcast Seva Portal’ will help satellite TV channels, teleport operators, MSOs, community radio stations (CRS) and private FM channels. It is also used for tracking applications, calculating fees and making payments.

Sweden has launched a pilot project to reduce the carbon emissions involved in steel production by switching some of that process from burning coking coal to burning hydrogen.
HYBRIT or Hydrogen Breakthrough Iron-making Technology – is a joint venture between steel giant SSAB, mining company LKAB and Swedish state-owned power firm Vattenfall. As per World Steel Association, every metric ton of steel produced emitted twice that much carbon dioxide.

US President Joe Biden signed the “Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act” into law, as he made lynching a federal hate crime.
As many as 4,743 persons were lynched between 1882 and 1968, with 3,446 of them being Black. This act was named after the murder of a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago by a group of White men in Mississippi in 1955 as he was alleged to have whistled at a White woman.

Viktor Orban, Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister has been elected again for the successive fourth term.
The 58-year old pro-Putin leader has been heading the country since 2010. He is also the country’s longest-serving leader since the fall of communism in 1989. In the latest elections, his Fidesz party was set to contril135 seats of the 199-seat Parliament.

The Blue Nile, a subsidiary of the Nile River originates at Lake Tana in Ethiopia and travels through Ethiopia and Sudan.
A shipwreck on the Blue Nile River happened in Sudan’s Sennar province has killed 23 people, all of them female. The Blue Nile is an important transport route for people and goods in the African nations.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology formed a 17 member advisory committee to guide the Rs 76,000 crore-Semiconductor Mission.
The Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw will be the Chairperson of the committee. NITI Aayog member V K Saraswat, Principal Scientific Advisor, and Secretaries from the Ministry of External affairs, Departments of expenditure, economic affairs, and promotion of industry and internal trade, will be members of the committee.

As per RBI, Card-less cash withdrawal, which was offered only by a few banks, will now be made available across all banks and ATMs via the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
UPI will be used for customer authorisation and this step is expected to enhance ease of transactions and eliminate frauds.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) revised down its forecast for global trade growth in 2022-23 to 3% from 4.7%.
The slash is because of the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war. WTO also warned of a potential food crisis caused by surging prices. It also forecasted that the global trade growth in 2023 would rise up to 3.4%.

The Delhi government included electric cycles under its Electric Vehicle (EV) Policy and announced that it will offer a subsidy of 5,500 each to the first 10,000 buyers.
This will include both passenger and cargo e-cycles with a speed of less than 25 km/hour. The first 10,000 buyers will get 25 per cent of the purchase incentive on buying the e-cycle.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh arrived in Washington DC as part of his five-day US visit which includes the India-US 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue.
2+2 dialogue involves meetings between Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar and their respective American counterparts. Ahead of the 2+2 dialogue between India and the US, Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a virtual meeting with US President Joe Biden.

The Centre’s asset monetisation drive mopped up 12% more than the target set for FY22, due to the strong performance of the coal and mineral blocks, highway stretches and power transmission lines.
In aggregate, revenues and investments mobilised from asset monetisation in 2021-22 stood at 96,000 crore, which will go up by at least 4,000 crore. The monetisation target was 88,200 crore for FY22, the first year of the 6-trillion four-year National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP)

Astronomers have recently found a near-identical twin of Jupiter which is located at a similar distance from its star as Jupiter is from our Sun.
Named K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb, the exo-planet located 17,000 light-years from Earth, has been detected by a team of astrophysicists using data obtained by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Scientists used Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and a method known as gravitational micro-lensing to spot this object.

President Ramnath Kovind inaugurated the annual Madhavpur Mela, the five-day cultural fair, in the coastal village of Madhavpur in Gujarat.
The fair celebrates the marriage of Hindu deity Lord Krishna with Rukmini. Similar events are being organised across Gujarat and in eight Northeast states. From 2018, in association with the Union Ministry of Culture, the Gujarat government started organising events during the fair.

India and the US have decided to establish a new ‘India-US Education and Skills Development Working Group’.
It aims to further strengthen cooperation in the field of education and skill development through joint collaborations. The Group also promote student and scholar mobility to build people-to-people linkages. It is issued a part of the joint statement issued after the fourth India-US 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue.

According to a study released by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), the frequency and intensity of forest fires have increased in the past two decades.
The study, ‘Managing Forest Fires in a Changing Climate’, found that there has been a ten-fold increase in forest fires in the past two decades. More than 62 per cent of Indian states are prone to high-intensity forest fires. Mizoram had the highest number of forest fires in the last two decades, with more than 95 per cent of its districts being forest fire hotspots.

Pakistan Muslim League (N) Leader Shehbaz Sharif was sworn-in as the new Prime Minister of Pakistan, after a no-confidence motion was introduced against his predecessor Imran Khan.
Sharif was elected unopposed after rival candidate Shah Mahmood Qureshi announced that his party will boycott the voting and staged a walkout. Shehbaz, the younger brother of former three-time Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, was elected as the country’s 23rd Prime Minister.

The Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) launched the “Svanidhi se Samriddhi” programme in 126 additional cities across 14 states and Union territories.
“Svanidhi se Samriddhi”, an additional programme of PM Svanidhi, was launched last year in 125 cities under the first phase, covering around 35 lakh street vendors and their families. PM Svanidhi aims at providing an affordable working capital loan to street vendors.

Manila-based Asian Development Bank recently released its flagship Asian Development Outlook (ADO) 2022.
It projected South Asia’s largest economy India to grow by 7.5 per cent in the current fiscal year (2022-23) and by eight per cent the next year (2023-24). It also estimated a seven per cent collective growth for South Asian economies in 2022. South Asia comprises Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) maintained an accommodative stance and cut the real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth projection for the 2022-23 to 7.2 per cent, against the earlier projection of 7.8 per cent.
The inflation forecast has also been hiked from 4.5 per cent to 5.7 per cent for the FY 2022-23. The reasons are excessive volatility in global crude oil prices and extreme uncertainty over the evolving geopolitical tensions.

Gujarat has topped NITI Aayog State Energy and Climate Index-(SECI) Round 1 among larger states. It is followed by Kerala and Punjab. Among the smaller states, Goa topped the index.
The index ranks the states and union territories on six parameters — discoms performance, access affordability and reliability of energy, clean energy initiatives, energy efficie­ncy, environmental sustainability and new initiatives.