Current Affairs Quiz - October, 2021

Notes:
UNESCO 2021 State of the Education Report for India: No Teachers, No Class was released recently. As per the report, the gross enrolment ratio (GER) for elementary schools has increased from 81.6 in 2001 to 93.03 in 2018-19 and stands at 102.1 in 2019-2020.
The overall retention is 74.6 per cent for elementary education and 59.6 per cent for secondary education in 2019-20. Only 19% schools across India have access to internet. The teaching workforce has a deficit of over 1 million teachers and the need is likely to grow.

Notes:
The World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended the use of the first-ever malaria vaccine for children.
The WHO panel approved the RTS,S/AS01 malaria or Mosquirix – a vaccine developed by the British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). As per WHO, Malaria kills about 500,000 people each year, about half of them are the children in Africa. Mosquirix is given in three doses between ages 5 and 17 months, and a fourth dose roughly 18 months later.

Notes:
India is set to host its largest naval exercise, Ex Milan, early next year. India has also invited 46 countries to take part.
The exercise will see the participation of all Quad countries while the U.S. being invited for the first time. Milan, which began in 1995, is a bi-annual exercise and brings together Navies of all the countries in the region. It was so far held at Port Blair but is now being shifted to Visakhapatnam.

Notes:
A set of 136 countries including India have set a minimum global tax of 15% for big companies. This sets a floor tax rate for these countries to attract investment and prevents countries from levying tax at a lower rate to multinational companies.
By many countries including the USA, this move is seen as a level playing field and this rate is lower than the corporate tax rate of 23.5% in many countries.

Notes:
The UN Human Rights Council has passed a resolution recognised “access to a clean and healthy environment” as a fundamental right. This is seen as a milestone step to fight climate change.
The resolution in this regard was introduced by Costa Rica, the Maldives, Morocco, Slovenia and Switzerland. It was passed with 43 votes in favour and 4 abstentions from Russia, India, China and Japan.

Notes:
Indian Born Dr.Abdul Qadeer Khan, also known as the father of Pakistan’s atomic weapons program died recently in Pakistan. He was born in the year 1936 in Bhopal and moved to Pakistan during the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan.
Dr. Khan is said to have made Pakistan a nuclear power, from its scratch.

Notes:
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development have released the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index for the year 2021, under the tag line “Unmasking disparities by ethnicity, caste and gender”.
The index measures poverty by considering various deprivations experienced by people across the globe. The 2021 report has stressed that Disparities in poverty among ethnic groups are very high in many countries.

Notes:
From the images captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers led by Timothy Hamilton have discovered an unusual gravitational lensing configuration.
Named as ‘Hamilton’s Object,’ it consists of two images of a spiral background galaxy in a fold configuration and a third resolved image of the same spiral galaxy. Together, they create a tangential point configuration.

 

Notes:
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal recently launched the ‘Desh ke Mentor’ programme to provide career guidance to the students of class 9 to 12.
The Delhi government school students will be mentored by subject experts for providing various career options. Every mentor will adopt up to 10 students to provide career counselling. Actor Sonu Sood has been named by the Delhi government as the brand ambassador of the initiative.

 

Notes:
The ‘Dhole’ (Cuon alpinus) is an animal native to Central, South, East, and Southeast Asia. Other names for the species include Asiatic wild dog, Indian wild dog, whistling dog, red dog, and mountain wolf. It is a Schedule II species under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972.
A recent study has identified 114 priority tehsils where habitats can be consolidated to enhance population connectivity for the dhole or Asiatic Wild Dog. The animals are found in three clusters across India namely the Western and Eastern Ghats, central Indian landscape and North East India.