General Science Questions (MCQs) for Competitive Examinations

Notes:
Apiculture is the practice of keeping bees as well as the manufacturing of honey and beeswax. A beekeeper (or apiarist) keeps bees in order to collect their honey and other products that the hive produce to pollinate crops, or to produce bees for sale to other beekeepers. A location where bees are kept is called an apiary or “bee yard.”

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Edward Jenner introduced the vaccine for smallpox. Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by one of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. In 1980, the World Health Organization declared smallpox an eliminated disease.

Notes:
The liver produces urea and other waste materials and then it pours it all in the right ventricle of the heart for oxygenation. The heart then distributes the blood to various parts of the body. So the impure blood brought by the Hepatic Vein and other blood vessels gets distributed through the aorta. This clearly indicates that hepatic vein from kidneys carries the largest amount of urea, while the renal vein from kidneys carries the least.

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‘Survival of the fittest’ is a phrase that originated from Darwinian evolutionary theory as a way of describing the mechanism of natural selection. Herbert Spencer first used the phrase, after reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, in his Principles of Biology (1864), in which he drew parallels between his own economic theories and Dar-win’s biological ones.

Notes:
Myxine is a species of jawless fish (Agnatha). It is known as Hag fish in Europe. These are generally classified with the lampreys into the superclass Agnatha (jawless vertebrates) within the subphylum Vertebrata. All other living fishes (shark, rays, chimeras and bony fishes) possess true jaws derived from gill arches and are placed in the superclass Gnathostomata.

Notes:
Casein-Lactose protein-sugar pair is present in milk. Normal bovine milk contains 30-35 grams of protein per litre of which about 80 percent is arranged in casein micelles. Casein is present in milk, but it’s not a milk sugar like lactose. Instead, casein is one of the proteins found in milk. Unlike lactose, which causes an intolerance, these proteins in milk are what’s responsible for a milk allergy, according to Food Allergy and Research Education.

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Swine flu is a disease of pigs that can, in rare cases, be passed to humans. It is a highly contagious respiratory disease caused by one of many Influenza A viruses. The disease is spread among pigs by direct and indirect contact, aerosols, and from pigs that are infected but do not have symptoms.

Notes:
Deciduous trees and shrubs are plants that annually lose their leaves at the end of each growing season; usually during the winter, but can also occur during a dry season in warm climates. Common examples of deciduous trees include oak, maple, and hickory trees. Oak trees are characteristic deciduous trees that lose their leaves in the fall and regrow them in the spring.

Notes:
Wilhelm Johannsen was a Danish botanist, plant physiologist and geneticist. His most well-known research concerned so-called pure lines of the self-fertile common bean. He was able to show that even in populations homozygous for all traits, i.e. without genetic variation, seed size followed a normal distribution. This was attributable to resource provision to the mother plant and to the position of seeds in pods and of pods on the plant. This led him to coin the terms phenotype and genotype and introduce the term gene. This term was coined in opposition to the then common pangene that stemmed from Darwin’s theory of pangenesis.

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Dark fermentation is the fermentative conversion of organic substrate to bio-hydrogen. It is a complex process manifested by diverse groups of bacteria, involving a series of biochemical reactions using three steps similar to anaerobic conversion. Wastewater is used as a potential substrate for bio-hydrogen production in the dark fermentation process.