Test: June 2022 Weekly Current Affair - 1 - UPSC MCQ

The West Nile Virus is a mosquito-borne, single-stranded RNA virus. It is a flavivirus related to the viruses that cause St. Louis encephalitis, Japanese encephalitis, and yellow fever.

Culex species of mosquitoes act as the principal vectors for transmission. It is transmitted by infected mosquitoes between and among humans and animals, including birds, which are the reservoir host of the virus.

“Mosquitoes become infected when they feed on infected birds, which circulate the virus in their blood for a few days. The virus eventually gets into the mosquito’s salivary glands. During later blood meals (when mosquitoes bite), the virus may be injected into humans and animals, where it can multiply and possibly cause illness.”

Prime Minister inaugurated the country’s first liquid nano urea plant at Kalol.
liquid nano urea is essentially urea in the form of a nanoparticle. Urea is a chemical nitrogen fertiliser, white in colour, which artificially provides nitrogen, a major nutrient required by plants.
The product has been developed at IFFCO’s Nano Biotechnology Research Centre (NBRC) at Kalol.
While conventional urea has an efficiency of about 25 per cent, the efficiency of liquid nano urea can be as high as 85-90 per cent. Conventional urea fails to have the desired impact on crops as it is often applied incorrectly, and the nitrogen in it is vaporised or lost as gas. A lot of nitrogen is also washed away during irrigation.
Liquid nano urea is sprayed directly on the leaves and gets absorbed by the plant. Fertilisers in nano form provide a targeted supply of nutrients to crops, as they are absorbed by the stomata, pores found on the epidermis of leaves.

The act identifies four types of rights:

1. Title rights:
   It gives FDST (Forest Dwelling Scheduled Tribe) and OTFD (other traditional forest dwellers) the right to ownership to land farmed by tribals or forest dwellers subject to a maximum of 4 hectares.
   Ownership is only for land that is actually being cultivated by the concerned family and no new lands will be granted.
2. Use rights:
   The rights of the dwellers extend to extracting Minor Forest Produce, grazing areas, to pastoralist routes, etc.
3. Relief and development rights:
   To rehabilitation in case of illegal eviction or forced displacement and to basic amenities, subject to restrictions for forest protection
4. Forest management rights:
   It includes the right to protect, regenerate or conserve or manage any community forest resource which they have been traditionally protecting and conserving for sustainable use.

The Union government recently said that it plans to develop a framework to curb fake reviews of products on e-commerce websites after studying the “best practices available globally”. 

Due to fake and misleading reviews, the right to be informed, which is a consumer right under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 is violated.”

In India, fake reviews pose a threat to the consumer rights under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019. The Act states that the consumers have a right to be “informed about the quality, quantity, potency, purity, standard and price of goods, products or services”
The Consumer Protection Act,2019 comes in to force from today i.e. 20th July 2020.
Under this act every e-commerce entity is required to provide information relating to return, refund, exchange, warranty and guarantee, delivery and shipment, modes of payment, grievance redressal mechanism, payment methods, security of payment methods, charge-back options, etc. including country of origin which are necessary for enabling the consumer to make an informed decision at the pre-purchase stage on its platform.

The Commonwealth of Nations, simply referred to as the Commonwealth, is a political association of 54 member states, almost all of which are former territories of the British Empire.

It was originally created as the British Commonwealth of Nations through the Balfour Declaration at the 1926 Imperial Conference, and formalised by the United Kingdom through the Statute of Westminster in 1931. The current Commonwealth of Nations was formally constituted by the London Declaration in 1949, which modernised the community and established the member states as “free and equal”.
The head of the Commonwealth is currently Queen Elizabeth II. Queen Elizabeth II is the longest-serving monarch in British history and the year 2022 celebrates her 70th year on the throne.

Under the Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act, 1994, amended in 2011 and 2014, organs can be harvested from deceased donors or from living relatives of the recipient (children, siblings, spouse, or grandparents, and grandchildren). The Act also allows unrelated donors such as relatives other than close ones, long-term friends, or in-laws, but prohibits any financial exchange.

Although livers, pancreas, or lungs can be harvested from living donors, the rackets mainly target the kidney as it is the most in demand.

The kidney can survive longer outside of the body — 24 to 36 hours — than the lungs (4-5 hour) and the liver (8-12).

What causes kidney failure?
The most common cause is hypertension and diabetes. Other causes include certain hereditary diseases, infections, and autoimmune diseases. “High blood pressure and diabetes are the biggest causes of kidney damage in India, leading to 50% of kidney failures. Obesity is also a big risk factor because it increases the risk of diabetes and hypertension.

Aerosols:

• Aerosols are defined as a combination of liquid or solid particles suspended in a gaseous or liquid
• In the atmosphere, these particles are mainly situated in the low layers of the atmosphere (< 1.5 km) since aerosol sources are located on the terrestrial surface.
• certain aerosols can still be found in the stratosphere, especially volcanic aerosols ejected into the high-altitude layers.
• The origin of atmospheric aerosols is either natural or the result of anthropogenic activities

Effects of aerosols:

• They affect the atmospheric chemical composition.
• They can reduce visibility.
• They have important impacts on air quality and human health (e.g., aerosols can cause damage to heart and lungs).
• They serve as nuclei for cloud droplets or ice crystals in ice clouds.

GDP is the total market value of all finished goods and services produced within a country in a set time period.
GNI is the total income received by the country from its residents and businesses regardless of whether they are located in the country or abroad.

GNP includes the income of all of a country’s residents and businesses whether it flows back to the country or is spent abroad. It also adds subsidies and taxes from foreign sources.

The Phillips curve is an economic concept developed by A. W. Phillips stating that inflation and unemployment have a stable and inverse relationship.

The Laffer Curve is a theory developed by supply-side economist Arthur Laffer to show the relationship between tax rates and the amount of tax revenue collected by governments. The curve is used to illustrate Laffer’s argument that sometimes-cutting tax rates can increase total tax revenue.

The UIDAI, the statutory body mandated to collect Aadhaar data.

Locking biometrics: If you are worried about misuse of your Aadhaar biometric data, you can also lock it from the UIDAI website. When you lock your biometrics (fingerprint, iris, and face), they can no longer be used for authentication. 
Use VID: The Virtual Identity, or VID, is a system of “Limited KYC” (Know Your Customer). This hides the Aadhaar number from the authenticating agency, while still confirming the identity of the user. This is a 16-digit number, but temporary in nature. So, unlike the permanent 12-digit Aadhaar number, the VID is valid only for some time.

Gait is defined as a manner of walking or moving on foot. Gait analysis is a technique in podiatry medical care and the treatment of the foot, which is used to evaluate and diagnose conditions that affect walking and posture.

The analysis can help experts zero in on the source of an injury or pain that determines the way in which an individual stands or walks. It can also be used by physiotherapists for treatment, and in athletics training so that athletes can perform better and in greater comfort.

Gait analysis techniques have now been borrowed by forensic sciences experts to identify suspects in criminal cases. For the analysis, experts compare the gait of a person seen in CCTV footage from the crime spot with a sample of the suspect’s walk. Using computer software, the two images are compared.
In India, police have relied on the gait test in a few other cases previously.
The degree of uniqueness of a person’s gait compared with other, more precise parameters used to establish identity, such as fingerprints or a DNA test, is yet to be established.

Carbon dioxide measured at the Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory, Hawaii, run by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), peaked for 2022 at 421 parts per million in May.

• SERI is the only multi-stakeholder, collaborative nonprofit organization in the world focused exclusively on minimizing the environmental and health risks posed by used and end-of-life electronics.
• SERI works to create a world where electronic products are reused and recycled in a way that results in resource preservation, the well-being of the environment, and the health and safety of workers and communities.
• Recognizing the environmental, economic, and social benefits of reuse, the R2 Standard was written in a way that allows for more opportunities to extend the useful life of electronic devices.

Hate Speech as defined by the 267th report of the Law Commission of India is “an incitement to hatred primarily against a group of persons defined in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief and the like”.

Under Indian Penal Code:

• Sections 153A and 153B of the IPC: Punishes acts that cause enmity and hatred between two groups.
• Section 295A of the IPC: Deals with punishing acts which deliberately or with malicious intention outrage the religious feelings of a class of persons.
• Sections 505(1) and 505(2): Make the publication and circulation of content which may cause ill-will or hatred between different groups an offence.

Dementia is a group of symptoms that affect memory and thinking and interfere with daily life. Alzheimer’s Disease is the main and major cause of dementia. Treatments to reduce the symptoms and progression of dementia can be clinical, or methods such as practising yoga, breathing exercises, brisk walking and listening to tuneful music. It is an age-related disease, affecting over 55 million people across the world. The National Health Portal of India says that as per the Census 2011, dementia affects 2.7% of the 65 million Indian Senior Citizens over 65 years of age.

• The SDR is neither a currency nor a claim on the IMF. Rather, it is a potential claim on the freely usable currencies of IMF members. SDRs can be exchanged for these currencies. It cannot be used to fund infrastructure projects as it is not a currency. Same goes for settling domestic financial bills of the government.
• SDR allocations can play a role in providing liquidity and supplementing member countries’ official reserves.
• IMF member countries can borrow SDRs from its reserves at favourable interest rates, mostly to adjust their balance of payments to favourable positions.

RBI will raise the cost of money (that is, raise the interest rate) as well as cut down the amount of money in the financial system (that is, curb the liquidity) in a bid to control retail inflation.

The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the RBI sits once every two months — typically in February, April, June, August, October and December — to review its policy stance. Once in a while, in times of emergency, as it happened in early 2020 when Covid broke, the RBI meets off-cycle and announces a tweak to its policy stance.

• The Bhakti movement, which began in the 7th century in South India, had begun to spread across north India in the 14th and the 15th centuries. The movement was characterized by popular poet-saints who sang devotional songs to God in vernacular languages, with many preaching for the abolishing the Varna system and some kind of Hindu-Muslim unity. They emphasized an intense emotional attachment with God.
• One school within the Bhakti movement was the Nirguni tradition and Sant Kabir was a prominent member of it. In this tradition, God was understood to be a universal and formless being.

• The phenomenon of gravitational lensing occurs when a huge amount of matter, such as a massive galaxy, cluster of galaxies or a black hole, creates a gravitational field that distorts and magnifies the light from objects behind it.
• Gravitational lensing is based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity (Mass bend light).
• Normal lenses such as the ones in a magnifying glass work by bending light rays that pass through them in a process known as refraction, in order to focus the light somewhere else.
• Similarly, the gravitational field of a massive object causes light rays passing close to that object to be bent and refocused somewhere else.
• The more massive the object, the stronger its gravitational field and hence the greater the bending of light rays – just like using denser materials to make optical lenses results in a greater amount of refraction.
• In effect, gravitational lenses act like natural cosmic telescopes.

How magnetars form?
During the course of their evolution, massive stars – with masses around 10-25 times the mass of the Sun – eventually collapse and shrink to form very compact objects called neutron stars. A subset of these neutron stars are the so-called magnetars which possess intense magnetic fields. These are highly dense and have breathtakingly high rotation speeds – they have rotational periods that can be just 0.3 to 12.0 seconds.

• Anti-dumping duty is different from countervailing duty. The countervailing duty is imposed in order to counter the negative impact of import subsidies to protect domestic producers.
• Countervailing Duties (CVDs) are tariffs levied on imported goods to offset subsidies made to producers of these goods in the exporting country.
• CVDs are meant to level the playing field between domestic producers of a product and foreign producers of the same product who can afford to sell it at a lower price because of the subsidy they receive from their government.
• Anti-dumping duty is a customs duty on imports providing a protection against the dumping of goods at prices substantially lower than the normal value whereas Countervailing duty is a customs duty on goods that have received government subsidies in the originating or exporting country.
• Anti-dumping measures are taken to ensure fair trade and provide a level playing field to the domestic industry. 

• Section 135 of the Companies Act mandates corporates who are beyond a certain level of profits and turnover to pay at least 2% of their net profits before tax to the development space. This law gives corporates the necessary impetus to collaborate with non-state actors like Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs). This is a classic case of state-driven governance mechanism promoting collaboration among non-state actors.
• A key pillar of democratic governance is citizens’ power to question the state.

The Gulf of Bothnia is the northernmost arm of the Baltic Sea. It is situated between Finland’s west coast and Sweden’s east coast. In the south of the gulf lie the Åland Islands, between the Sea of Åland and the Archipelago Sea.

Rainfall is not the only criteria that the IMD relies on to declare the monsoon’s onset. Windspeeds of a minimum strength and depth in the atmosphere, the Outgoing Longwave Radiation — a measure of cloudiness — and rainfall appearing to be consistent and well distributed over Kerala, are important criteria.