10 PM Current Affairs Quiz: December 9, 2020

Statement 1 is correct. The Private final consumption expenditure (PFCE) is defined as the expenditure incurred by the resident households and non-profit institutions serving households (NPISH) on final consumption of goods and services, whether made within or outside the economic territory.
Statement 2 is correct. The Private Final Consumption Expenditure formed more than 57 percent of the Real Gross Domestic Product (At 2011-12 Prices) of India in 2019-20.

Option 1 is correctly matched. India’s current Parliament building was designed by the famous architects Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker who were responsible for the planning and construction of New Delhi. The Foundation Stone of Parliament House was laid on 12 February 1921 by H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught.
Option 2 is correctly matched. Le Corbusier, was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture.
Corbusier was 63 when he started work on Chandigarh, after several of his plans to reconstruct cities of Europe, after World War II, were rejected.
Chandigarh Capitol Complex, located in the sector-1 of Chandigarh, is a government compound designed by the architect Le Corbusier and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

A new digital platform for COVID 19 Vaccination Delivery called ‘CO-WIN’ is being used as institutional mechanisms at the level of States, Districts and Blocks that will inspect and supervise the entire process of vaccination.
This user friendly mobile app for recording vaccine data is working as a beneficiary management platform having various modules. In the process of forming database of Healthcare Workers, which is in an advanced stage across all States/UTs, data is presently being uploaded on the Co-WIN platform.

Statement 1 is correct. The National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration for COVID- 19 (NEGVAC) has also been formed in last August to aid and provide guidance on i) prioritization of population groups, ii) procurement and inventory management, iii) vaccine selection, and iv) vaccine delivery and tracking mechanism.
Statement 2 is incorrect. The NEGVAC is chaired by Dr. V.K.Paul, Member (Health), NITI Aayog and co-chaired by the Health Secretary.

The research and innovation investment in India is, at the current time, only 0.69% of GDP as compared to 2.8% in the United States of America, 4.3% in Israel and 4.2% in South Korea. The NEP 2020 has proposed setting up of National Research Foundation (NRF).
The primary activities of the NRF will be to:
–fund competitive, peer-reviewed grant proposals of all types and across all disciplines;
–seed, grow, and facilitate research at academic institutions, particularly at universities and colleges where research is currently in a nascent stage, through mentoring of such institutions;
-act as a liaison between researchers and relevant branches of government as well as industry, so that research scholars are constantly made aware of the most urgent national research issues, and so that policymakers are constantly made aware of the latest research breakthroughs; so as to allow breakthroughs to be optimally brought into policy and/or implementation.
# AICTE is responsible for formulation and maintenance of norms and standards of technical education.

IIT-Bombay researchers have compiled and released an Urban Quality of Life Index comparing the quality of life in various cities in India and ranked them on the basis of various categories such as water, power, electricity, literacy rate, employment rate among others.
–Mumbai has topped the index followed by Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai.
–The index has factored in gender parity; Chennai is the most women-friendly city and Patna the least.

Both statements are incorrect.
Recently the Foreign Ministers of Nepal and China jointly certified the elevation of Mount Everest at 8,848.86 metres above sea level — 86 cm higher than what was recognised since 1954.
The elevation of 8,848 m was determined by Survey of India in 1954. In 1999, a US team put the elevation at 29,035 feet (nearly 8,850 m). This survey was sponsored by the National Geographic Society, US.

Machine learning is a method of data analysis that automates analytical model building. It is a branch of artificial intelligence based on the idea that systems can learn from data, identify patterns and make decisions with minimal human intervention.
Examples of machine learning: Digital assistants search the web and play music in response to our voice commands. Websites recommend products and movies and songs based on what we bought, watched, or listened to before. Spam detectors stop unwanted emails from reaching our inboxes. Medical image analysis systems help doctors spot tumors they might have missed. And the first self-driving cars like Tesla are hitting the road.

A new drug called Molnupiravir has been shown to stop the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in 24 hours. Results of the research by scientists at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Georgia State University, have been published in the journal Nature Microbiology.
Molnupiravir is being developed by the biotechnology firm Ridgeback Biotherapeutics in collaboration with pharmaceutical firm Merck.

The original meaning of the term “quantum supremacy,” as proposed by John Preskill in 2012, is to describe the point where quantum computers can do things that classical computers can’t.
Google in 2019 said that its 54-qubit Sycamore processor was able to perform a calculation in 200 seconds that would have taken the world’s most powerful supercomputer 10,000 years. That would mean the calculation, which involved generated random numbers, is essentially impossible on a traditional, non-quantum computer.
Recently a Chinese team, based primarily at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, reported their quantum computer, named Jiuzhang, is 10 billion times faster than Google’s.
Assuming both claims hold up, Jiuzhang would be the second quantum computer to achieve quantum supremacy anywhere in the world.
# Where classical computers perform calculations using bits, which can have one of two states (typically represented by a 1 or a 0), quantum bits, or qubits, can exist in many states simultaneously. This allows them to solve problems more quickly than classical computers.