Daily Quiz: UPSC Prelims Marathon – October 5

Diseases By Air Pollutants

Yokkaichi asthma (SO2)

• Burning of petroleum and crude oil releases large quantities of sulfur oxides which causes severe smog
• Results in severe cases of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, chronic bronchitis, pulmonary emphysema, and bronchial asthma

Pneumoconiosis / Black Lung Disease

• an occupational lung disease caused by inhalation of coal dust, often in mines

Asbestosis

• a lung disease, which leads to long-term breathing complications, caused by exposure to asbestos (No cure)

Silicosis

• a lung disease that is caused by inhaling tiny bits of silica mainly by the workers working in silica industries or sand blasting sites

Emphysema

• Breaking down of lung tissues due to air pollution & cigarette smoke leading to difficulty in expanding & contracting of lungs

• National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog’s SATH (Sustainable Action for Transforming Human capital) Program was launched in inGuwahat. The SATH program aims to provide structured support to Assam in identifying key health priorities and implement the solutions towards transforming thehealth and improving the well-being of people of states
• The program will be implemented by NITI along with McKinsey & Company and IPE Global consortium, who were selected through a competitive bidding process.SATH Program aims to build three selected states viz. Assam, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka as future ‘role model’ states for health systems. Under it, NITI Aayog will work in close collaboration with state machinery in these three selected states to design a robust roadmap of intervention, develop program governance structure, set up monitoring and tracking mechanisms, handhold state institutions through the execution stage and providesupport on a range of institutional measures to achieve the end objectives.

All are correctly matched

• An asteroid is a celestial body – composed of rock, metal or a mixture of both – that is orbiting the Sun. Most of them are in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Even though there are millions of asteroids with sizes up to more than 500 km (like Pallas and Vesta) they are of no danger to the planet Earth. The biggest body in the asteroid belt – Ceres – is officially not called an asteroid anymore but a dwarf planet.
• Comet- A smaller celestial body mainly composed of ice and dust. If a comet approaches the Sun it can generate a tail of gas and/or dust.
• Meteor- A bright tail of light caused by a meteoroid during its atmospheric flight, also called a shooting star or falling star.

India is collaborating with Russia to build Rooppur nuclear power plant in Bangladesh. It will be first initiative under an India-Russia nuclear deal to undertake atomic energy projects in third countries. It will also be India’s first atomic energy venture abroad. Rooppur Nuclear project (capacity of 2*1200 MWs) is Bangladesh’s first atomic energy project. It is being built with Russia’s help near Dhaka. After commissioning of two units each with capacity of 1200 MWs, Bangladesh will be third South Asian country after India and Pakistan to harness atomic energy for energy purpose.

• A quantum computer, still largely a theoretical entity, employs the principles of quantum mechanics to store information in ‘qubits’ instead of the typical ‘bits’ of 1 and 0.
• Advantages: Qubits work faster because of the way such circuits are designed, and their promise is that they can do intensive number-crunching tasks much more efficiently than the fastest comparable computers.

For Example: to sort a billion numbers, a quantum computer would require 5 millionfewer steps than a traditional machine, and would find the solution in only 31,623 steps.

Mendelian Principles of Inheritance

• Law of dominance: In heterozygous organism,only one out of the two alleles expresses itself and (Dominance trait) while the others remain hidden(Recessive trait)
• Example Tt-Tall
• T –dominant
• T-recessive

Mendel’s law of independent assortment states that the alleles of two (or more) different genes get sorted into gametes independently of one another. In other words, the allele a gamete receives for one gene does not influence the allele received for another gene.