QUIZ – 2017: Insights Current Affairs Quiz, 25 July 2017

Solution: a.

• ‘IAS’ stands for ‘International Aids Society’
• A nine-year-old infected with HIV at birth has spent most of its life without needing any treatment, say doctors in South Africa.
• In the news: The results of this case are being presented at the IAS Conference on HIV Science.

BBC: SA child ‘virtually cured’ of HIV;

Solution: c.

• White snow reflects up to 90% of solar radiation while dark patches of algae will only reflect about 35% or even as little as 1% in the blackest spots.
• One concern now is that rising temperatures will allow algae to flourish not only on the slopes of the narrow margins of the Greenland ice-sheet but also on the flat areas in the far larger interior where melting could happen on a much bigger scale.
• Earlier research had found that the Greenland ice sheet is covered with a range of contaminants carried on the winds including dust and soot from as far away as Canadian prairie fires and the industrial heartlands of China, America and Europe.
• But studies over the past five years have shown that the majority of the dark material may be biological with different kinds of algae turning the ice black, brown, green and even mauve.

BBC: Sea level fears as Greenland darkens;

Solution: c.

• This division of fiscal responsibility as provided for in our Constitution was made with a view to making States self-sufficient, and with a view to supplying to regional powers the flexibility needed to govern according to the respective needs of their people. The underlying idea here was that States should be uninhibited in tinkering taxation policies in whatever manner they desired so long as their laws conformed to the other constitutional diktats.
• The introduction of the GST, however, militates against this grand constitutional objective, against the aspiration set out in Article 1 of the Constitution, which declares India as a “Union of States”. In endeavouring to pursue the goal of creating a single market through a homogenisation of the tax regime, the amendment grants to both the Union and the State governments concomitant powers over nearly all indirect taxes.
• To further effectuate this effort, the law also creates a GST Council. In acting as a nodal agency of sorts, this council will recommend a number of things, among others the list of taxes that will be subsumed by the GST, the goods and services that will be exempt from the levy of tax, the rates at which tax shall be levied, and so forth. The council’s decisions will require a three-fourths majority, but the Central government’s votes will have a weightage of one-third of the total votes cast, according, thereby, to the Union a virtual veto.

TH: Taxing times for the states;

Solution: b.

• The Outer Space Treaty, which laid the foundation for an international space law, came into force in October 1967, following a feverish, decade-long space race between the Cold War rivals, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
• Formulated to bar its signatory countries from placing weapons of mass destruction in orbit of the Earth, on the Moon or any other celestial body or the outer space, the treaty aimed to get the countries to use space exploration for peaceful purposes.
• The space race itself is an important segment in the history of mankind, one that intensified the Cold War rivalry as a fight for supremacy in space became a matter of pride for both the countries.

TH: Mankind’s giant leaps;

Solution: d.

“Over the years, knowledge and technology have become central to most of the bilateral agreements and strategic dialogues between the two countries. Bilateral agreements such as the Partnership to Advance Clean Energy and joint participation in mega projects in the areas of fundamental science such as the High Intensity Superconducting Proton Accelerator, the Thirty Meter Telescope, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory and the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar Mission will have a far-reaching impact. Going forward, we can reap higher pay-offs if collaborative engagements are focused on sector-agnostic technologies, such as information technology, nanotechnology, and gene-editing technology..”

TH: Bilateral catalyst;