Current Affairs Questions

Explanation :

• A meta material is any material engineered to have a property that is not found in naturally occurring materials.
• They are made from assemblies of multiple elements fashioned from composite materials such as metals and plastics.
• The materials are usually arranged in repeating patterns, at scales that are smaller than the wavelengths of the phenomena they influence.
• These derive their properties not from the properties of the base materials, but from their newly designed structures.

Applications

• Potential applications of meta materials are diverse and include optical filters, medical devices, remote aerospace applications, sensor detection and infrastructure monitoring, smart solar power management, crowd control, radomes, high-frequency battlefield communication and lenses for high-gain antennas, improving ultrasonic sensors, and even shielding structures from earthquakes.
• Meta materials offer the potential to create super-lenses. Such a lens could allow imaging below the diffraction limit that is the minimum resolution that can be achieved by conventional glass lenses.

Explanation :

• Founded in 2002, the Global Fund is a partnership designed to accelerate the end of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria as epidemic.
• Microsoft founder Bill Gates was one of the first private foundations among many bilateral donors to provide seed money for the partnership.
• Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the Global Fund is the world's largest financier of AIDS, TB, and malaria prevention, treatment, and care programs.
• The Global Fund is a financing mechanism rather than an implementing agency.
• Programs are implemented by in-country partners such as ministries of health, while the Global Fund secretariat, whose staff only have an office in Geneva, monitor the programs.

Explanation :

• Article 72 and Article 161 empowers the President and the Governors respectively, the power to grant pardons, reprieves, respites or remissions of punishment or to suspend, remit or commute the sentence of any person convicted of any offence.
• Remission: It implies reducing the period of the sentence without changing its character. For example, a sentence of rigorous imprisonment for five years may be remitted to rigorous imprisonment for one year.
• Respite: It denotes awarding a lesser sentence in place of one originally awarded due to some special fact, such as the physical disability of a convict or the pregnancy of a woman offender.
• Reprieve: It implies a stay of the execution of a sentence (especially that of death) for a temporary period. Its purpose is to enable the convict to have time to seek pardon or commutation from the President.

Explanation :

P-waves

• These are the first waves detected by seismographs (instruments used to detect and record earthquakes).
• These are longitudinal waves which means they vibrate along the same direction as they travel.
• Examples of longitudinal waves include sound waves and waves in a stretched spring.

S-waves

• These waves arrive at the detector after primary waves.
• These are transverse waves which means they vibrate at a right angle to the direction in which they travel.
• Examples of transverse waves include light waves and water waves.

Difference

• Both types of seismic waves can be detected near the earthquake centre but only P-waves can be detected on the other side of the Earth.
• P-waves can travel through solids and liquids (since they are longitudinal waves) whereas S-waves can only travel through solids (as they are transverse waves).
• This means the liquid part of the core blocks the passage of S-waves.

Explanation :

• Chabahar Port is a seaport in Chabahar located on the Makran coast of Sistan and Balochistan Province, next to the Gulf of Oman and at the mouth of Strait of Hormuz.
• It serves as Iran's only oceanic port, and consists of two separate ports named Shahid Kalantari and ShahidBeheshti.
• Development of the port was first proposed in 1973 by the last Shah of Iran, though development was delayed by the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
• Being close to Afghanistan and the Central Asian countries of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, etc., it has been termed the "Golden Gate" to these land-locked countries.

Explanation :

• National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF) is India’s first infrastructure specific investment fund that was set up by the Government of India in February 2015.
• The objective behind creating this fund was to maximize economic impact mainly through infrastructure investment in commercially viable projects, both Greenfield and Brownfield.

Funds

Master Fund

• The Master Fund is an infrastructure fund with the objective of primarily investing in operating assets in the core infrastructure sectors such as roads, ports, airports, power etc.

Fund of Funds

• The Fund of Funds anchor and/or invest in funds managed by fund managers who have good track records in infrastructure and associated sectors in India.
• Some of the sectors of focus include Green Infrastructure, Mid-Income & Affordable Housing, Infrastructure services and allied sectors.

Strategic Investment Fund

• Strategic Investment Fund is registered as an Alternative Investment Fund II under SEBI in India.
• The objective of National Investment and Infrastructure Fund II (“Strategic Fund”) is to invest largely in equity and equity-linked instruments.
• The Strategic Fund focuses on green field and brown field investments in the core infrastructure sectors.

Explanation :

• Tangam is an endangered Sino-Tibetan language of the Tani subgroup spoken in Arunachal Pradesh state in North-East India.
• It has been marked ‘critically endangered’ by the UNESCO World Atlas of Endangered Languages (2009).

Tangam People

• It is a little-known community within the larger Adi tribe of Arunachal Pradesh which resides in the hamlet of Kugging in Upper Siang district’s Paindem circle.

Explanation :

• The global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) is an international measure of acute multidimensional poverty covering over 100 developing countries.
• The original MPI was co-designed and launched in 2010 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report Office (HDRO) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at University of Oxford. It was first published in 2010 as part of the Twentieth Anniversary of the Human Development Report (HDR).
• The MPI assesses poverty at the individual level. If a person is deprived in a third or more of ten (weighted) indicators, the global MPI identifies them as ‘MPI poor’. The extent – or intensity – of their poverty is also measured through the percentage of deprivations they are experiencing.

Dimensions

MPI uses three dimensions and ten indicators which are:

• Education: Years of schooling and child enrollment (1/6 weightage each, total 2/6);
• Health: Child mortality and nutrition (1/6 weightage each, total 2/6);
• Standard of living: Electricity, flooring, drinking water, sanitation, cooking fuel and assets (1/18 weightage each, total 2/6)

Explanation :

• Assam government has decided to upgrade the Dehing Patkai Wildlife Sanctuary into a national park.

About Dehing Patkai Wildlife Sanctuary

• Located in Dibrugarh and Tinsukia districts, the 111.19 sq km Dehing Patkai was declared a wildlife sanctuary in 2004.
• It forms the largest stretch of lowland rainforest in the country.
• Dehing is the name of the river that flows through this forest and Patkai is the hill at the foot of which the sanctuary lies.
• The Dehing Patkai Wildlife Sanctuary and a part of Dehing Patkai Rainforest, due to their importance for elephant habitat, were declared as Dehing-Patkai Elephant Reserve under Project Elephant.
• There are more than a dozen different ethnic groups living in the area including the indigenous Assamese communities, particularly Tai Phake, Khamyang, Khampti, Singpho, Nocte, Chutia, Ahom, Kaibarta, Moran and Motok, Burmese, and non-indigenous Nepali people.

Explanation :

• The Gujarat government has decided to form a five-member commission to identify members of Rabari, Bharvad and Charan communities, who are eligible for benefits of Schedule Tribe (ST) status.
• In October 1956, the central government conferred ST status on people of Rabari, Bharvad and Charan communities, living in nesses (tiny, oval-shaped hutments made of mud) of Gir, Barda and Alech areas of Gujarat.

Rabari

• They migrated from Rajasthan via Kutch and now most of them live in the Okhamandal region of Jamnagar district.
• They speak ‘Bhopa’ which is a mixture of Gujarati, Kachchi, Marwari words and Pharasi (Persian) and use Gujarati script.
• Their folk songs are called ‘Siya’.

Bharvad

• The Bharwads are pastorals who are permitted to graze their sheep and cattle in certain demarcated areas of the reserved forest.
• They communicate in Gujarati and use Gujarati script.

Charan

• The Charan, also called Gadhvi, is a small tribe in Gujarat and the name Charan is derived from the word ‘Char’ which means grazing.
• They speak Gujarati and use Gujarati script.
• These are traditionally cattle breeders. They have also adopted agriculture as their secondary occupation.