QUIZ – 2017: Insights Current Affairs Quiz, 07 August 2017

Solution: b.
The same question was posted here earlier.
• The unprecedented number of deaths (2,040) in 2015 forced the authorities to think of response measures.
• Ahmedabad, the first city to develop a heat wave response system in 2013 following its dreadful experience with heat in 2010, offered a model. This response system was created with support from public health institutions. Preparing the health system to identify symptoms of heat stress and providing treatment through urban health centres is one intervention it decided upon. The plan involved other relatively simple and straightforward measures like reviewing school timetables, rescheduling work timings to cooler hours, making water widely available and reserving religious sites and libraries as cooling centres.
• Thanks to prodding by NDMA, nine state governments prepared and implemented heat action plans in the last two years. A targeted awareness campaign, including temperature alerts and instructions to avoid heat, too helped bring down deaths.

IE: Remarkable success in reduction of heat-related deaths;
From last year: TH: How Ahmedabad beat the heat;
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Solution: a.
There are climatological reasons for Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Odisha being the epicentre of heat related deaths. In April and May, the dynamics of the wind systems coming from the southwestern parts of India, and those flowing in from the northwestern parts work in such a manner (this is due to the presence of a trough – a low-pressure region – over these states) that the heat over the northern plains and central India is pushed over these three states, raising temperatures unusually higher than normal.

IE: Remarkable success in reduction of heat-related deaths;
Skymet (refer to paragraph before the last);

Solution: d.
In a find that has excited archaeologists, 50 pieces of bone ornaments that date to 4,000 years ago have been found in a hamlet of Narmetta, an agricultural village on the outskirts of Hyderabad in Telangana. According to Historian Prof. K.P. Rao, who led the 2005 Gachibowli megalithic excavation that dated the earliest megalithic site to 2200 BC, “Bone ornaments have not been found till date in India. We had perforated teeth but this I am hearing for the first time.”

TH: Revealed: 4,000-year-old bone jewels;

Solution: d.
An ethics-based question, mains-oriented.
• The ego-defence function of attitude: Some attitudes serve to protect the person that holds them from psychologically damaging events or information by allowing them to be recast in less damaging or threatening ways. This inevitably may involve a degree of bias or distortion in the way the world is interpreted but people will readily do this in order to preserve a particular (usually favourable) view of themselves or the world.

Attitude -> Source-3 (Functions): Insights – How to prepare GS-4;
Improvisation: IE: An immoral subsidy;

Solution: a.
• North Korea occupies the northern portion of the Korean peninsula, which juts out from the Asian mainland between the East Sea (Sea of Japan) and the Yellow Sea
• The country is bordered by China and Russia to the north and by the Republic of Korea (South Korea) to the south.

Improvisation: TH: China urges NK to stop missile tests;
Britannica: North Korea;
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