Solution (c)

An annular solar eclipse occurs when the moon comes between the sun and the earth but doesn’t cover the former completely, leaving the sun’s visible outer edges to appear as a ‘ring of fire’. This leads to a drop in solar irradiance which impacts power generation. The expected drop in generation is expected to be around 11,943 mega watt (MW) on 21 June.

Eclipses occur every year, but annular solar eclipses are not common. India has experienced three solar eclipses in the past ten years—on 22 July 2009, 15 January 2010 and 26 December 2019.

The eclipse this year also comes in the backdrop of the lockdown which has led to a drastic fall in pollution, thereby improving solar radiation.

Solution (d)

It is a medium-sized bovid native to the Tibetan plateau.

IUCN – Near Threatened.

THINK!

• Shahtoosh

Solution (a)

The World Bank’s World Development Report, published annually since 1978, is an invaluable guide to the economic, social, and environmental state of the world today.

Solution (a)

Kerala accounts for more than 90 percent of the total rubber production in the country. The total area under rubber cultivation in the state is 5.45 lakh hectares.

According to the Board’s statistics, the country produced 7.10 lakh MTs of natural rubber during fiscal 2019-20, as against the previous year’s production of 6.53 lakh MTs. Some 70% of this produce is consumed by the tyre industry, while the rest goes into the non-tyre sector such as rubber bands, tubes and footwear.

Under a normal industry scenario, the tyre manufacturers in the country consume around 1 lakh MTs of natural rubber a month and 12 lakh MTs a year. The difference, between the production and consumption, is imported mostly from Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand. Last fiscal, the country imported 4.65 lakh MTs of natural rubber.

Solution (d)

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) is a foundation that takes donations from public, private, philanthropic, and civil society organisations, to finance independent research projects to develop vaccines against emerging infectious diseases (EID). CEPI is focused on the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) “blueprint priority diseases”, which includes: the Middle East respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus (MERS-CoV), the Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the Nipah virus, the Lassa fever virus, and the Rift Valley fever virus, as well as the Chikungunya virus and the hypothetical, unknown pathogen “Disease X”.

CEPI was conceived in 2015 and formally launched in 2017 at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. It was co-founded and co-funded with US$460 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Wellcome Trust, and a consortium of nations, being Norway, Japan, Germany; to which the European Union (2019) and Britain (2020) subsequently joined.