MCQ – GK Questions

District Collector Pavankumar G. Giriyappanavar addressed the students at YiP 3.0 organized at Kumaraguru campus in Coimbatore. He exhorted students to cultivate traits of listening, empathy, and mutual respect to become effective future leaders.

The Australia-India relationship has evolved from the simplistic 'three Cs' (Cricket, Curry and Commonwealth) to a more meaningful 'four Ds': Democracy, Defence, Diaspora and Dosti. This shift reflects a decade of institution-building and deeper engagement between the two nations.

The Quad is an informal security grouping consisting of India, Australia, United States, and Japan. According to the article, this grouping has become the backbone of the Indo-Pacific strategy of India and Australia, reflecting a decade of institution-building between these nations.

Nabanna, described as Bengal's 'Neelbari' (blue edifice), is the blue and white secretariat of West Bengal that came to embody Mamata Banerjee's aesthetic and political imprint. This is in contrast to the century-old red edifice of Lal Bari, the Writers' Building, which was the seat of Bengal's colonial and postcolonial bureaucracy.

In the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections, the BJP won 207 out of 294 seats with 45.84% of the vote share, marking a paradigm shift in Bengal's political landscape. The Trinamool Congress was reduced to 80 seats with 40.8% vote share, while the Left Front and Congress combined got only 7.42% votes.

According to the article, a group of eminent citizens led by Gandhian O.P. Shah drafted a joint appeal to the leaders of India and Pakistan urging them to engage in dialogue. This appeal led to a public debate on whether India should restart dialogue with Pakistan. Mani Shankar Aiyar was mentioned as a signatory to the letter.

The article clearly states that India and Pakistan have not engaged in dialogue since 2016 when talks broke down after the terror attacks at Pathankot and subsequently at Uri. This marks the last formal engagement between the two nations at the government level, making it 12 years without dialogue as of 2026.

The visit produced a Joint Declaration on Defence and Security Cooperation that included a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Australia's Maritime Border Command and the Indian Coast Guard, and adopted an India-Australia Maritime Security Collaboration Roadmap to address shared threat perceptions. These mechanisms aim to deepen interoperability between the two nations.

The Lowy Institute Poll found trust in the United States at a record low of 31%, with a narrow margin of Australians suggesting that Canberra should distance itself from Washington under U.S. President Donald Trump. This reflects the strain on Australia's alliance dependence and its push for diversification in strategic partnerships, including with India.

Sabyasachi Mukherjee of TIFR Mumbai was recognised twice in 2025 for his work in complex dynamics and connections between Mandelbrot sets and Kleinian groups. The Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar 2025 was announced on 26 October 2025 by the Ministry of Science and Technology (PIB PRID:2182615). The Infosys Prize 2025 was announced on 12 November 2025. Both recognitions cover the same body of mathematical research, from two entirely different institutions.

Nikhil Agarwal is the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics at MIT and a co-director of Blueprint Labs. He received the Infosys Prize 2025 in Economics for developing empirical methods to study and improve allocation mechanisms — practical systems like school admission lotteries, medical residency matching, and kidney exchange programmes that need to match people to places or resources without using prices.

The conventional Haber-Bosch process produces ammonia (used in fertilisers feeding ~50% of the world) by reacting nitrogen with hydrogen at high temperature and pressure, using natural gas as both fuel and hydrogen source. Manthiram at Caltech developed electrochemical pathways — including lithium-mediated nitrogen reduction and oxygen-atom transfer catalysis — that use renewable electricity instead, at room temperature and pressure, reducing the process's carbon footprint.

Andrew Ollett of the University of Chicago is the world's leading scholar of Prakrit languages — the ancient South Asian spoken languages distinct from Sanskrit, including Pali, Ardhamagadhi, and Maharashtri. His work covers Prakrit grammar, the cultural history of why authors chose Prakrit over Sanskrit, and the circulation of Prakrit texts across the subcontinent. He is the first Prakrit language scholar to win the Infosys Prize Humanities category.

Sushant Sachdeva of the University of Toronto received the Infosys Prize 2025 in Engineering and Computer Science for his advances in mathematical optimisation, particularly developing near-linear-time algorithms for flow networks and linear programs. His results have been described as producing "absurdly fast" algorithms because they approach what theorists consider the theoretical limit of speed for these problems.

Anjana Badrinarayanan at NCBS Bengaluru received the Infosys Prize 2025 in Life Sciences for her work on DNA damage repair, particularly for discovering novel mitochondrial DNA damage response pathways. She is the only winner in the 2025 Infosys Prize cohort who is based in India.

In 2024 the Infosys Science Foundation announced a new direction: restricting the Infosys Prize to researchers under the age of forty, shifting the award from a mid/senior career recognition to an early-career recognition. They also introduced a new condition for winners based outside India: they are required to spend thirty days at an Indian institution of their choice and give a public lecture there within the award year.

The Vigyan Team award under RVP 2025 was given to the CSIR Aroma Mission team for their work in Agricultural Science. The mission introduced aromatic crops (lavender, rose, lemongrass, patchouli) to farmers across northern and northeastern India, demonstrating a pathway to the essential oils market that improved incomes without drastically changing traditional farming practices.

Vedika Khemani of Stanford University received the Infosys Prize 2024 in Physical Sciences for her contributions to non-equilibrium quantum matter, most notably the discovery of time-crystals. A time-crystal is a phase of matter that breaks time-translation symmetry — it oscillates periodically without consuming energy. Khemani's theoretical work provided the framework that enabled experimental groups to verify the phenomenon in the lab.

The Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar was instituted in 2023 and first awarded in 2024. It effectively replaced the standalone Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, which had been given annually by CSIR since 1958. The SSB Prize was last awarded in 2022. The RVP retained the SSB name in its third category — Vigyan Yuva–Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar — for young scientists under 45.

Neena Gupta is a mathematician at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. In 2014, she proved a striking negative answer to the Zariski Cancellation Problem in positive characteristic — a problem in algebraic geometry that had remained open since 1949. The Infosys Prize 2024 (presented at a ceremony on 11 January 2025 in Bengaluru) formally recognised this work alongside her broader contributions to commutative algebra.