QUIZ – 2017: Insights Current Affairs Quiz, 19 September 2017

Solution: d.
Last week, the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries announced that the oldest Indian reference to the digit zero has been identified, in a manuscript dating back to the third or fourth century. The ‘Bakshali manuscript’ consists of 70 leaves of birch bark and contains hundreds of zeros in the form of dots. The manuscript cannot claim to contain the earliest use of zero – other ancient civilisations too used symbols to denote zero as a placeholder, including the Babylonians 5,000 years ago, millennia before the Bakhshali Manuscript. But the manuscript does lay claim to being the oldest surviving document that expresses zero, the placeholder, in a form that would later evolve into the modern symbol for zero, the number.
• Additional Information: ZerOrigIndia Foundation, or the Zero Project, based in Netherlands, is a crowdsourced project with the aim of determining the origin of the zero digit as the numeral we know today. They are of the view that in ancient India are found numerous so-called ‘cultural antecedents’ that make it plausible that the mathematical zero digit was invented here. It hypothesizes that mathematical zero (‘shunya’, in Sanskrit) may have arisen from the contemporaneous philosophy of emptiness or Shunyata. If philosophical and cultural factors found in India were important to the development of zero as a mathematical concept, it would explain why other civilizations did not develop zero as a mathematical concept.
• The first text to discuss zero in the numerical sense is the Indian astronomer Brahmagupta’s work “Brahmasphutasiddhanta,” which was written in A.D. 628.

http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/1800-year-old-black-dot-is-first-zero-researchers/article19698886.ece;
http://indianexpress.com/article/explained/in-page-from-indian-history-zeros-oldest-living-ancestor-reveals-its-age-4850053/;
https://www.livescience.com/60425-oldest-zero-indian-manuscipt.html;
https://www.livescience.com/27853-who-invented-zero.html;

Solution: a.
According to Britannica Encyclopedia, it is a territory occupying 363 square km along the Mediterranean Sea just northeast of the Sinai Peninsula. The Gaza Strip is unusual in being a densely settled area not recognized as a de jure part of any extant country.
• Palestinian Islamist Hamas group said on September 17 it has dissolved its administration that runs Gaza and agrees to hold general elections in order to end a long-running feud with President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement.
• The last Palestinian legislative election was held in 2006 when Hamas scored a surprise victory, which laid the ground for a political rupture. Hamas and Fatah fought a short civil war in Gaza in 2007 and since then Hamas has governed the small coastal enclave.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Gaza-Strip;
In the news: http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/hamas-dissolves-gaza-administration-in-palestinian-unity-bid/article19703176.ece;
—

Solution: b.
Whether the interpretation that legislators withdrawing support to their own party’s government amounts to them voluntarily giving up their membership (and thus being subject to provisions of the tenth schedule) is acceptable, will have to be decided by the courts if the decision of the Speaker of the TN Assembly is challenged.
A member incurs disqualification under the defection law (tenth schedule):
1. if he voluntary gives up the membership of the political party on whose ticket he is elected to
2. if he votes or abstains from voting in the House contrary to any direction given by his political
3. if any independently elected member joins any political party; and
4. if any nominated member joins any political party after the expiry of six months.

Chapter ‘Parliament’; Indian Polity by M Laxmikanth;
Source/Improvisation: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/a-partisan-ruling/article19710531.ece;

Solution: a.
The quintessential feature of a cess is that it is a tax levied for a specific purpose. As per Article 270 of the Constitution, cesses imposed by the Parliament for earmarked purposes need not be shared with state governments. The proceeds are retained exclusively with the Union government, which should ideally be used for their stated purpose, as is evident from the Fourth Finance Commission Report. Additionally, the contributor to the cess and beneficiaries of the earmarked purpose must be relatable.
If compensating State governments is considered to be a specific purpose, any general revenue raising measure can be considered to be backed by an earmarked purpose. Once the money is transferred to State governments, it can be used to fund just about any scheme and may even be used merely to adjust the respective State government’s fiscal deficit. Further, there is no relation between the persons contributing to the cess and the recipients, the State governments. All these factors make the cess look more like an additional tax or surcharge which becomes problematic as surcharge on the GST is prohibited under Article 271 (by the 101st Constitution Amendment Act, 2016).

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/questions-about-the-gst-cess/article19710552.ece;

Solution: c.
Targets mentioned in options 1 and 2 must be interchanged.
• SDG 2 (‘Zero Hunger’): End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
• SDG 3 (‘Good health and well-being’): Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
• SDG 4 (‘Quality Education’): Ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning

Improvisation: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/reimagining-the-obc-quota/article19712086.ece; http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/the-encephalitis-challenge/article19712084.ece; http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=170894;

http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/;
—