General Science Questions (MCQs) for Competitive Examinations

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Chemical weapons are called “poorman’s bomb”. These cause catastrophic damage, and are easy to produce. Sarin is a colorless and odourless agent, and is extremely potent. It was used in Damascus in 2013. Mustard Gas is possibly the most commonly used chemical agent and gets its name from the distinctive odour of rotten mustard. It is less potent and usually only 5 to 10 percent people exposed to it usually die. It was widely used during Second World War. VX is a nerve agent which is odourless and appears as brownish oily substance.

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Van Mahotsav was started in 1950 by K. M. Munshi, the then Union Minster for Agriculture and Food to create enthusiasm among masses for forest conservation and planting trees. It is a week-long festival is celebrated in July on different days in different parts of India. The festival aims at increasing the green cover of India.

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African trypanosomiasis, also known as sleeping sickness, is a disease spread by an infected tsetse fly, found in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa.The vast majority of human cases result from the transfer of T. brucei trypanosomes by tsetse flies as they suck human blood. Sleeping sickness is caused by two different parasites, Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense and Trypanosoma brucei gambiense.

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Infection is the invasion of an organism’s body tissues by disease-causing agents, their multiplication, and the reaction of host tissues to the infectious agents and the toxins they produce. Infectious diseases can be spread from one person to another, for example through contact with bodily fluids, by aerosols (through coughing and sneezing), or via a vector, for example a mosquito.

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Animals, such as mammals and birds, that maintain a constant body temperature regardless of the temperature of the surroundings are called warm blooded. These include birds and mammals. Whales are aquatic mammals hence, being mammal, they are warm blooded. The have a thick layer of fats called blubber underneath their skin to maintain temperature even in cold water of oceans.

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An accessory fruit (sometimes called false fruit, spurious fruit, pseudo-fruit, or pseudo-carp) is a fruit in which some of the flesh is derived not from the ovary but from some adjacent tissue exterior to the carpel. Examples of accessory tissue are the receptacle of strawberries, figs, or mulberries, and the calyx of Gaultheria procumbens or Syzygium jambos. Pomes, such as apples and pears, are also accessory fruits, with much of the fruit flesh derived from a hypanthium.

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The Taungya system involves growing agricultural crops between rows of planted trees (sal, teak, etc). Along with jhum cultivation, it is one of the well-known systems of agro forestry programmes in practice in our country.

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A typical adult human stomach will secrete about 1.5 liters of gastric acid daily. The best-known component of gastric juice is hydrochloric acid, the secretory product of the parietal, or oxyntic cell. It is known that the capacity of the stomach to secrete HCl is almost linearly related to parietal cell numbers.

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Bile or gall is a bitter-tasting, dark green to yellowish brown fluid, produced by the liver aids in the process of digestion of lipids in the small intestine. In many species, bile is stored in the gall bladder and upon eating is discharged into the duodenum. Bile is a composition of the following materials: water (85%), bile salts (10%), mucus and pigments (3%), fats (1%), inorganic salts (0.7%) and cholesterol (0.3%).

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Haemoglobin is the iron-containing oxygen transporting metalloprotein in the red blood cells of all vertebrates. Similarly, Cytochromes are, in general, membrane-bound haemo-proteins containing heme groups and are primarily responsible for the generation of ATP via electron transport.