UPSC Quiz – 2024 : IASbaba’s Daily Current Affairs Quiz 24th June 2024

·       It is a highly regarded benchmark that assesses the performance of ports on parameters such as productivity, efficiency, and reliability.

·       It is released by the World Bank and S&P Global Market Intelligence.

·       It serves as a reference point for key stakeholders, including national governments, port authorities, development agencies, supra-national organisations, and private operators, in trade, logistics and supply chain services.

Highlights of CPPI 2023:

·       Yangshan port in China and Salalah port in Oman emerged as the top two ports in the rankings.

·       Nine Indian ports have secured places among the top 100 global ports.

·       While Visakhapatnam Port made it to the top 20 ports of the world at 19 in 2023, Mundra Port also climbed up the index at 27 in the current ranking.

·       This also marks advancement from Visakhapatnam’s 115th rank and Mundra’s 48th position in the 2022 rankings.

·       Vishakhapatnam Port has demonstrated impressive performance with a turnaround time (TRT) of 21.4 hours, achieving 27.5 moves per crane hour, and minimising berth idle time.

·       Additionally, seven more Indian ports, secured ranks in the top 100: Pipavav (ranked 41), Kamarajar (47), Cochin (63), Hazira (68), Krishnapatnam (71), Chennai (80), and Jawaharlal Nehru JNPA (96).

·       It is rare in beach sand which is destroyed by prolonged exposure to the waves and currents of the ocean.

·       It is a fairly common mineral, deep red in color. It crystallizes at high temperatures, usually where large mountain belts grind upwards out of colliding tectonic plates.

·       These are opaque, transparent to translucent minerals that can be found as individual crystals, pebbles, or clumps of inter-grown crystals.

·       There are six main types of garnet, all with slightly different chemical compositions. All kinds of garnet can form in the same place and sometimes garnets can be a combination of types e.g. pyrope-almadine or pyrope-spessartine.

Formation:

·       These are formed in metamorphic (schist, amphibolite, and eclogite) and igneous (some granites and peridotite) rocks.

·       This mineral grows deep in Earth’s crust, in the same kind of conditions in which diamonds are formed.

·       When sand contains an abundance of garnets, it usually contains epidote and magnetite as well.

·       Australia produces almost half of the world’s garnets, with the rest mainly coming from India, USA, and China.

·       Uses: It is used for manufacturing blasting media, abrasives, grinding wheels, mosaic cutting stones, decorative wall plasters, ceramics, polishing of picture tubes, glass polishing and antiskid surface for roads, air strips etc.

·       It is a desert region of southwestern Africa.

·       From north to south, it stretches from the Karas region of Namibia to the Northern Cape province of South Africa.

·       From west to east, it stretches from the Namib Desert to the Kalahari.

·       It covers an area of 400,000 square kilometres.

·       The Namibian section, north of the Orange River, is sometimes called Great Namaqualand.

·       The South African section, south of the Orange River, is sometimes called Little Namaqualand.

·       It is very dry. For a large part of the year succulents are almost the only plants that can be seen on the vast plains.

·       Succulents can hold water for long periods and can survive in droughts.

·       Rain falls mostly in the winter. If there is enough rain, wildflowers cover Namaqualand for a few weeks during springtime.

·       The area was traditionally inhabited by the Nama people before the German occupation of the region in the 19th century.

·       There are large deposits of copper in Namaqualand. The Nama mined them for hundreds of years.

·       In the early 1900s diamonds were discovered in several places in Namaqualand, including Sperrgebiet in Namibia and the Richtersveld in South Africa.

Termites

·       Termites are insects that eat wood.

·       They can damage buildings, furniture, and other wooden items.

·       Termites are found all around the world, and there are more than 2,000 species. However, they are most common in tropical rainforests.

·       Termites build damp nests in wood or underground.

·       Termites live in organized groups called colonies. Mature termite colonies can contain 60,000 to 1 million termites, depending on the type of termite colony.

·       Termites also help nature by breaking down dead wood into nutrients. The nutrients can then be recycled and used by bacteria and plants.

·       It is a French-Chinese satellite which aims to detect and study gamma-ray bursts.

·       It was launched by a Long March-2C rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China’s Sichuan Province.

·       It is a 930-kilogram satellite carrying four instruments – two French and two Chinese.

·       The satellite has been sent into an orbit over 600 kilometers above Earth and has a designed life of five years, though scientists expect it could be operational for as long as 20 years.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs):

·       GRBs generally occur after the explosion of huge stars – those more than 20 times as big as the sun – or the fusion of compact stars.

·       The extremely bright cosmic beams can give off a blast of energy equivalent to over a billion billion suns.

·       Observing them is like “looking back in time, as the light from these objects takes a long time to reach earth.

·       The rays carry traces of the gas clouds and galaxies they pass through on their journey through space – valuable data for better understanding the history and evolution of the universe.

·       GRBs are notoriously hard to catch as they can appear anywhere in the sky and last for just a few seconds. They are readily absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere, so the only way to record them is to place probes in space.

·       SVOM has the potential to unravel several mysteries in the field of GRBs, including detecting the most distant GRBs in the universe, which correspond to the earliest GRBs.

·       The data gathered will help test the laws of physics under conditions that cannot be replicated on Earth and provide insights into the dynamics of the universe.

·       The pipeline was built with the aim of transporting natural gas from Russia to Europe, bypassing traditional transit countries such as Ukraine.

·       The first line of the Nord Stream pipeline was completed in 2011 and the second in 2012, and it has since become a major source of natural gas for Europe.

·       Nord Stream 1 is a 1,224 km underwater gas pipeline running from Vyborg in northwest Russia to Lubmin in northeastern Germany via the Baltic Sea.

·       Nord Stream 2, which runs from Ust-Luga in Leningrad (Russia) to Lubmin, has the capacity to handle 55 billion cubic metres of gas per year once it becomes fully operational.

Methane:

·       It is the primary component of natural gas, and is responsible for approximately a third of the warming we are experiencing today.

·       Characteristics of Methane

·       It is a colorless odorless gas, flammable water insoluble gas.

·       It is also known as marsh gas or methyl hydride.

·       It is easily ignited. The vapors are lighter than air. Under prolonged exposure to fire or intense heat the containers may rupture violently and rocket.

·       It is a powerful and short-lived greenhouse gas, with a lifetime of about a decade and Global Warming Potential about 80 times greater than that of carbon dioxide (CO2) during the 20 years after it is released into the atmosphere.

·       The largest sources of methane are agriculture, fossil fuels, and decomposition of landfill waste.