General Science Questions (MCQs) for Competitive Examinations

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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.

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Cnidarian, also called coelenterate, any member of the phylum Cnidaria (Coelenterata), a group made up of more than 9,000 living species. ? Mostly marine animals, the cnidarians include the corals, hydras, jellyfish, Portuguese men-of-war, sea anemones, sea pens, sea whips, and sea fans.

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The right pulmonary artery is longer and larger and runs horizontally outward in front of right main bronchus and behind the superior vena cava, to the base of the right lung where it divides in two branches. The left pulmonary artery is shorter and runs horizontally over the left upper division bronchus, to the base of the left hilum where it divides into two branches.

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Ecological succession is unidirectional progressive process of development in an ecosystem or biome. Grass ecosystems are an early stage of succession in regions where the mature ecosystems are forests. However, grass ecosystems are climax ecosystems in grassland regions, where there is not enough rainfall to support a forest. Due to limiting factors such as water scarcity and forest fire, a grassland ecosystem changes to a desert ecosystem. The ecological succession of grassland is desert.

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Greenhouse gases that occur both naturally and from human activities include water vapor, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and ozone (O3). These gases contribute to atmospheric warming when they absorb infrared radiation emitted by the solar-warmed Earth and transfer their extra energy to the surrounding atmospheric gases.

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Typhoid fever, also known as typhoid, is a common water borne worldwide bacterial disease, transmitted by the ingestion of food or water contaminated with the feces of an infected person, which contain the bacterium Salmonella Typhi.

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The wings of insects, bats and birds, that evolved independently in each lineage separately after diverging from an ancestor without wings, are examples of analogous organs. Analogous organs are the opposite of homologous organs, which have similar functions but different origins.

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Plant wilting occurs after excessive loss of water by transpiration and lesser absorption. i.e. rate of transpiration exceeds rate of water absorption. On a hot day, plants transpire heavily and cannot absorb water speedily to keep pace with transpiration loss, even when there is enough water.

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These types of mechanism have been termed seismonastic movements. The movement occurs when specific regions of cells lose turgor pressure, which is the force that is applied onto the cell wall by water within the cell vacuoles and other cell contents.

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Cyanobacteria, also known as blue green algae, are single-celled and belong to the family of Prokaryotes. That means, they do not have a well defined cell nucleus. The ability of cyanobacteria to perform oxygenic photosynthesis is thought to have converted the early reducing atmosphere into an oxidizing one, which dramatically changed the composition of life forms on Earth by stimulating biodiversity and leading to the near-extinction of oxygen-intolerant organisms.