Current Affairs Questions & Answers - Mar 15 & 16, 2016

ANSWER: Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan

Explanation:
Central government is implementing Centrally Sponsored Scheme of Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan for providing financial support to proposals contained in the State Higher Education Plan approved by State Higher Education Councils to attain the objective of equity, access and quality. 115 universities and 1218 colleges have been approved by RUSA PAB for infrastructure gains.

ANSWER: Summer

Explanation:
Indian Meteorological Department has come out with a temperature outlook for the summer season and city as well as town wise heat forecasts, like it does for cyclones and rains. Summer temperature outlook with an early warning system for heatwaves and specific advisories will be valid for the April-June period. IMD in collaboration with Earth Systems Science Organisation will come out with the temperature outlook covering over 100 cities or towns. Death of 2300 persons due to heat wave across India last year is the reason for this advisory.

ANSWER: Pawan Chawla

Explanation:
Online automobile marketplace CarDekho has announced the appointment of Pawan Chawla as IT head. She was earlier IT head of Yatra dot com. Chawla will lead the overall IT infrastructure of the company. He has worked for over a decade in the field of IT and ITeS. Chawla has been named 'Cyber Security Strategist of The Year 2014-15' and 'Best Cyber Security Implementer of the Year 2014-15' by the CSO Forum, and has also won the 'Business Impact Award 2014-15' for successfully Implementing Enterprise Wide Security and Data Protection Policy.

ANSWER: Patrick J. Ennis

Explanation:
Wipro has appointed technologist Patrick J Ennis as an independent director to its board. His appointment is effective, April 1. Through this move, Wipro will ramp up investments in startups and disruptive technologies. Ennis is part of the senior team that builds and runs an international open innovation network consisting of an invention community of more than 10,000 members. He has also worked with Bell Labs, AT&T and Lucent Technologies.

ANSWER: Both a and b

Explanation:
The 2016 Irom Shormila Scholarship has been jointly awarded to Rohit Vemula (posthumously) of Hyderabad Central University and Kanhaiya Kumar of JNU, by JNUSU at the JNU admin blck.

Award is for student representatives seeking to strengthen India's constitutional democracy by upholding the constitutional ideals of fraternity, equality, right to life, and inspiring many others across the country.

ANSWER: Ernestine Anderson

Explanation:
The 87 year old jazz vocalist died on March 10 2016 at the age of 87 after a six decade career spanning 4 Grammy nominations and more than 30 albums. She also performed Garfield High School graduate Quincy Jones, another famous African American musician.Seattle’s Bumbershoot arts festival awarded her its Golden Umbrella.

ANSWER: Lloyd Stowell Shapley

Explanation:
He died on 12 March 2016. He was 92. A veteran in mathematical economics and especially game theory, he won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2012. He made fundamental contributions to economic theory and game theory and the Bondareva-Shapley theorem. This work introduced the notion of “balanced,” a key notion to this day for understanding when games have nonempty cores.Other than the Nobel, he won innumerable awards and honours that include John von Neumann Theory Prize and Golden Goose Award in 1981 and 2013 respectively.

ANSWER: Peru

Explanation:
Held in Lima, Peru, this event from 14 March to 17 March 2016 will address different issues related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Post 2015 Development Agenda.
Event is organized by the Secretariat of the Man and Biosphere Programme, the Ministry of Environment of Peru and its National Service of Natural Areas Protected by the State, and the MAB National Committee of Peru. UNESCO Committed and Man and Biosphere Program executives are working in the implementation of these reserves.

ANSWER: Dubai

Explanation:
Meeting was held to promote the power of broadband networks and services for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development bringing leaders from the public, private and social sectors together to seek the solutions to achieving education, equity and employment for all. This commission for Digital Development was established in May 2010 as a joint initiative by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). It seeks to prevent people from remaining offline.

ANSWER: Both b and c

Explanation:
The Ministry of Tourism has launched a programme open to college going students to inculcate in them appropriate tourism traits and knowledge, to enable them to act as Tourist Facilitators (Paryatak Mitra).The development and promotion of tourism is chiefly the duty of the State Governments/Union Territory Administrations.

ANSWER: International Olympic Committee

Explanation:
United Kingdom Anti Doping on 14th March 2016 was granted the role of organising a worldwide fight against performance enhancing drugs in a run up to the 2016 Olympic games at Rio. It was also appointed as the secretariat for the International Olympic Committee anti doping task force to standardise testing procedures. Announcement was come even as Russia has been banned by International Association of Athletics Federations following a report into mass doping violations. Russia’s own anti doping agency RUSADA was found to be non compliant at the World Anti Doping Agency code in March 2016.

ANSWER: March 15

Explanation:
World Consumer Rights Day was celebrated on March 15th marking the day for the global consumer movement. It also marks the date in 1962 President John F. Kennedy first outlined the definition of Consumer Rights. WCRD is an opportunity to promote basic rights of consumers for demanding those rights are respected and protected. This day was first observed in March 1983.

ANSWER: Htin Kyaw

Explanation:
Myanmar’s parliament has elected its first non military president to the post since the army took over in a coup in the 1960s. Kyaw was nominated by the National Lague for Democracy party last week an voted into the presidency by parliament. Suu Kyi barred from the presidency because she has sons who are foreign nationals, has made it clear she is “above the president” and Kyaw will act as a proxy.

ANSWER: Kakrapar

Explanation:
There was a leak at the Karapar atomic power station classified as Level 1 or lowest in a 7 rung classification scheme. International Nuclear and Radiological Event scale developed by International Atomic Energy Authority rates the mishap as akin to an anomaly in the plant. In contrast, the Fukushima and Chernobyl leaks were level 7 incidents.

ANSWER: Michael Jackson

Explanation:
The estate has agreed to sell its remaining stake in lucrative music catalogue Sony Corp for USD 750 million and the agreement for Jackson’s half-share of the Sony/ATV Music Publishing catalogue will give the company sole ownership of works by The Beatles, Bob Dylan and other hit making musicians, including Eminem and Taylor Swift. This is another posthumous block buster deal for Jackson whose estate has paid back the singer’s massive debts.

ANSWER: Smart Phone

Explanation:
This was done by transforming a single smart phone into a powerful microscope by replacing the camera with high resolution optics of a microscope. The smart phone can now detect diseases like malaria without much difficulty.

ANSWER: Nobel Peace Prize

Explanation:
Mother Teresa will be made a saint on September 4th, 19 years after the Nobel Laureate’s death, an announcement made by Pope Francis said. Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity and spent 45 years serving the poor, sick and orphaned. The elevation of Mother Teresa to sainthood came after the Church recognised the second miracle earlier. Mother Teresa died at 87 in the year 1997 in Kolkata.Canonisation was an important formality.

ANSWER: Wipro

Explanation:
Wipro has made a strategic investment and signed a partnership with Emailage Corporation which is a rapidly growing risk and fraud prevention company in the US. This is in line with its aim to improve its offerings across innovative and strategic sectors. Wipro has made an investment less than 5% of Emailage’s equity.

ANSWER: Schneider Electric

Explanation:
Wipro has announced a strategic partnership with Schneider Electric, a global specialist in automated systems and energy management to develop convergent solutions for Indian smart cities. The two companies have formed the partnership to deliver cost effective and efficient citizen services to urban and rural communities.

ANSWER: 700 km

Explanation:
The surface-to-surface, single-stage missile, powered by solid propellants, was test-fired from a mobile launcher at 9.15 AM from launch pad-4 of the Integrated Test Range (ITR) at Abdul Kalam Island (Wheeler Island), a defence official announced. The sophisticated missile covered 700 km distance within 9 minutes and 36 seconds, according to the statement. Weighing 12 tonnes, the 15-metre-long Agni-I, is designed to carry a payload of more than one tonne. Its strike range can be extended by reducing the payload. It was developed by ASL, DRDO in collaboration with Defence Research Development Laboratory and Research Centre Imarat and integrated by Bharat Dynamics Limited, Hyderabad.

ANSWER: 27

Explanation:
Researchers have presented a new model for what dark matter might be. 27 percent of the universe is dark matter. Only five percent is the matter of which all known materials consist: from the smallest ant to the largest galaxy. For decades, physicists have been working on the theory that dark matter is light and therefore interacts weakly with ordinary matter thereby producing particles as colliders. Theory's dark particles are called weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPs), and they are theorised to have been created in an inconceivably large number shortly after the birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. Sloth and his colleagues call their version of such a heavy particle a PIDM (Planckian Interacting Dark Matter) particle. In their new model, they calculated how the required number of PIDM particles could have been created in the early universe.