UPSC Quiz – 2020 : IASbaba’s Daily Current Affairs Quiz 8th Oct 2020

Solution (a)

• The Central Zoo Authority (CZA) is a statutory body under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. It was constituted in 1992 under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972.
• Members: It is chaired by the Environment Minister and has 10 members and a member-secretary.
• Objective: The main objective of the authority is to complement and strengthen the national effort in the conservation of rich biodiversity.
• Functioning: The authority provides recognition to zoos and is also tasked with regulating the zoos across the country.
• It lays down guidelines and prescribes rules under which animals may be transferred among zoos nationally and internationally.
• It coordinates and implements programmes on capacity building of zoo personnel, planned breeding programmes, and ex-situ research.

Solution (c)

The Godavari River System

and is spread in the states of Maharashtra (48.6%), Andhra Pradesh (23.4%), Madhya Pradesh (10.0%), Chattisgarh (10.9%), Orissa (5.7%) and Karnataka (1.4%).

River mouth: Bay of Bengal

Solution (b)

NCERT:

• It is an autonomous organization under the Ministry of Education (MoE) which is responsible for:
• Ensuring qualitative improvement in school education by undertaking and promoting research in areas related to school education.
• Prepare and publish model textbooks, supplementary material.
• Develop and disseminate innovative educational techniques and practices.
• Act as a nodal agency for achieving the goals of Universalization of Elementary Education.

Solution (d)

Sambhar Lake

• It is India’s largest inland saline water body located near Jaipur in Rajasthan.
• It is surrounded on all sides by the Aravali hills.
• It is the source of most of Rajasthan’s salt production.
• Sambhar has been designated as a Ramsar site (recognised wetland of international importance) because the wetland is a key wintering area for tens of thousands of flamingos and other migratory birds.

Solution (a)

• The Nobel Prize in Physics for the year 2020 was awarded to three astrophysicists Roger Penrose from the UK, Reinhard Genzel from Germany, and Andrea Ghez from the USA.
• Roger Penrose received half of this year’s prize for the discovery that a black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.
• Black holes were one of the first and most extreme predictions of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity which came in 1915.
• The theory explains gravity, as objects try to follow a straight line through a universe whose geometry is warped by matter and energy. As a result, planets, as well as light beams, follow curving paths.
• Dr Penrose proved that if too much mass accumulated in too small a place, collapse into a black hole was inevitable. At the boundary of a black hole, called the event horizon, one would have to go faster than the speed of light to escape it, which is impossible. At the centre of a black hole, where the density became infinite, the laws of physics, would no longer apply.
• Genzel and Ghez received the second half of the prize for the discovery of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milkyway galaxy, now known to be the Sagittarius A*.
• It has a mass four million times that of the Sun and is confined to an area roughly the size of our Solar System.
• In 2019, scientists got the first optical image of a black hole which is at the centre of the Messier 87 galaxy.
• Sagittarius A* is the second black hole whose photographs have been captured by the Event Horizon Telescope project. It is yet to be released.
• Dr. Ghez is only the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, following Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018.
• Other News: Americans Harvey J Alter and Charles M Rice, and British scientist Michael Houghton were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology, 2020 for the discovery of the Hepatitis C Virus.