UPSC General Knowledge & Sports GK

Notes:
The New Development Bank was established by the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), not the European Union. Its headquarters is located in Shanghai, China, not Moscow, Russia. Therefore, both the statements are incorrect.

Notes:
The first statement is correct as the SAARC Seed Bank Agreement is aimed at enhancing the seed replacement rate among member states. The second statement is incorrect because India ratified the agreement in 2011, following its endorsement at the 17th SAARC Summit held in Maldives in 2011.

Notes:
The first statement is correct as the headquarters of ACU are in Tehran, Iran. The second statement is incorrect because India is, in fact, a member of the Asian Clearing Union. The ACU promotes regional monetary cooperation among its members, which include India, Iran, and several other Asian countries.

Notes:
India is a member of BIMSTEC and the Indian Ocean Rim Association. However, India is not a member of the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC), which is an Asia-Pacific regional forum with 23 full member committees, but India is not part of this grouping.

Notes:
Swiss-system
In a Swiss-system tournament, no one is eliminated. Normally, as the players continue to win games, they face progressively stronger opposition, with the result that those participants who are not so successful end up playing against each other. In Swiss-system events, players are paired with each other according to the following general principles such as:

• A player is not paired with any other player more than once.
• Players with the same score are paired whenever possible.
• Colors are assigned to players by the director as fairly as possible. Alternating colors is the ideal.

Round-Robin System
In round-robin tournaments, a player plays one game with every other player in the tournament. The person with the highest score at the end of the tournament is the winner. Please note that each participant plays every other participant an equal number of times. Round-robin tournaments involving four participants are known as quads.
Double Round-Robin
Double round-robin is the same as round-robin except that a player plays each of the other players twice; one game as white and one as black.
Scheveningen system
Scheveningen system is similar to the Round-robin style. The Scheveningen system is often used to face two chess teams against each other, where each player on one team plays each player on the other team.
Match Play
Match play occurs when two players are playing a series of games against one another in a match. This is not a very popular format except on the world class level. Match play was often used in the past for the World Chess Championship where the challenger plays a match against the World Champion for the title.
KO
KO refers to Knockout. This is not a very popular match play tournament format in chess. A knockout tournament is a single-elimination tournament where the loser of each match is immediately eliminated from the tournament. This means that the tournament is conducted as a series of matches in which the winner of each match advances to the next round and the loser is eliminated. Well known chess tournaments held in the knockout format include London 1851 and the 2007 Chess World Cup.
Tie Breaker
This refers to a number of different systems that are used to break ties, and thus designate a single winner, where multiple players or teams tie for the same place in a Swiss system chess tournament. Most of the methods are numerical methods based on the games that have already been played or other objective factors, while some methods require additional games to be played, etc. The idea behind the methods based on the games already played is that the player that played the harder competition to achieve the same number of points should be ranked higher.
Armageddon
A game which White must win to win the match, but which Black only needs to draw to win the match. White has more time than Black: the discrepancy can vary.

Notes:
The Strategic Partnerships Model in Defence sector was approved by Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) in May 2017. The policy aims to encourage broader participation of the private sector, in addition to DPSUs/OFB, in the manufacture of defence platforms and equipment such as aircraft, submarines, helicopters and armoured vehicles. The four segments that have been identified for acquisition under Strategic Partnership (SP) route are Fighter Aircraft; Helicopters; Submarines & Armoured Fighting Vehicles (AFVs).

Notes:
Kadeisha is a Canadian soccer player and is a member of the Canadian National Soccer Team. She is only 17 and at 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup she was given the Best Young Player Awar

Notes:

• Grandmaster is the highest title or ranking that a chess player can achieve. The Grandmaster title — and other chess titles — is awarded by the International Chess Federation, FIDE (acronym for its French name Fédération Internationale des Échecs), the Lausanne-Switzerland-based governing body of the international game. The title is the badge of the game’s super elite, a recognition of the greatest chess talent on the planet, which has been tested and proven against a peer group of other similarly talented players in the world’s toughest competitions.
• Besides Grandmaster, the Qualification Commission of FIDE recognises and awards seven other titles: International Master (IM), FIDE Master (FM), Candidate Master (CM), Woman Grandmaster (WGM), Woman International Master (WIM), Woman FIDE Master (WFM), and Woman Candidate Master (WCM).
• All the titles, including that of Grandmaster, are valid for life, unless a player is stripped of the title for a proven offence such as cheating.
• In 1950, FIDE started to formally designate the best players as Grandmasters, based on a set of laid-down criteria. Twenty-seven Grandmaster titles were awarded in the first batch in 1950, including to then world champion Mikhail Botvinnik of the erstwhile USSR.
• A player must have a performance rating of 2,600 or higher in a FIDE tournament that has nine rounds.
• FIDE has so far recognised fewer than 2,000 Grandmasters out of the millions who play the game around the world. A vast majority of Grandmasters have been male. Russia (and the erstwhile USSR) has produced the most Grandmasters in the world, followed by the United States and Germany.
• India became a chess powerhouse in the 2000s, and now has more than 70 Grandmasters.
• The Indian prodigy Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu became the second youngest grandmaster in chess history at age 12 years, 10 months, and 13 days after getting his third grandmaster norm with a performance of 2,710 at the Gredine open in Ortisei, Italy in 2018. In 2016, Praggnanandhaa had become the world’s youngest IM at age 10 years, 10 months, and 19 days.

Notes:
Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Sudan have all been suspended from the African Union following military coups. Egypt is not currently suspended. The African Union (AU), established in 2001, has the authority to suspend member states for unconstitutional changes in government to uphold democratic principles among its 55 member countries.

Notes:
Kamikaze drones, also known as loitering munitions, are single-use weapons designed to explode on impact. They possess a “wave-off” feature allowing attack abortion (option 2), are hard to detect (option 3), and can be launched easily and quickly (option 4). However, they are not multiple-use weapons, ruling out option 1.