General Science Questions (MCQs) for Competitive Examinations

Notes:
Flowers emit fragrance to attract pollinators which are mainly insects. The fragrance plays a prominent role in the localization and selection of flowers by insects, especially moth-pollinated flowers, which are detected and visited at night. If they have become infested with herbivores like caterpillars, they attract beneficial insects like parasitic wasps with the help of scent signals from their leaves.

Notes:
The stapes or stirrup is a bone in the middle ear of humans which is involved in the conduction of sound vibrations to the inner ear. The stapes transmits sound vibrations from the incus, another little bone in the middle ear, to the oval window adjacent to the inner ear. The stapes is the smallest bone in the body.

Notes:
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.

Notes:
Intensive farming is an agricultural intensification and mechanization system that aims to maximize yields from available land through various means, such as heavy use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. It is characterized by a low fallow ratio, higher use of inputs such as capital and labour, and higher crop yields per unit land area.

Notes:
Connective tissue is a group of tissues in the body that maintain the form of the body and its organs and provide cohesion and internal support. Bone, ligaments, tendons, cartilage, and adipose (fat) tissue are examples of connective tissue. Cardiac muscle is an example of muscle tissue. It is so named because it is found in the heart.

Notes:
Vitamin C is quite unstable when cooked or stored improperly. It is very liable and easily destroyed during cooking as well as storage. It is a water-soluble and temperature-sensitive vitamin, so is easily degraded during cooking, and elevated temperatures and long cooking times have been found to cause particularly severe losses of vitamin C.

Notes:
Female gametes are also called eggs or ova. They are created during the cellular reproduction process known as meiosis. The resulting gamete cell is a haploid cell. When the two haploid cells, the egg and sperm, fuse together during fertilization, the result is a diploid cell called a zygote.

Notes:
Enzymes are defined as biological catalysts. Chemically all enzymes are globular proteins. Each enzyme catalyses only one chemical reaction. Protein part of enzyme is known as Apoenzyme. It forms an active enzyme system by combination with a coenzyme and determines the specificity of this system for a substrate.

Notes:
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.

Notes:
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.