• PRELIMS

• 31 questions.

• 6 starred questions as tiebreakers.

• One word/ one phrase answers.

1

• The two islands you see on the picture are called as Little Diomede(left) and Big Diomede (right). The story is that if you stand on Big Diomede and take look at Little Diomede you can get a glimpse of the past. Likewise if you stand on Little Diomede and look at Big Diomede you can get a glimpse of the future. This story is not just a hearsay or a folktale.

• Where specifically are they located?

2

• It lasts for approximately 24 hours in the presence of sunlight and is reduced to about 20 hours in artificial light.

• What two-word chronobiological term that derives from the Greek for 'about a day'?

3

• Which work of art covering 40 acres, by a former roadworks inspector with PWD, was formally opened to the public in 1976 after nearly two decades of illegal and obscured existence ?

4

• It is commonly thought of as a jellyfish but is actually a colony of polyps and medusoids. It has an air bladder or sail that allows it to float on the surface of the ocean. It has no means of propulsion and is pushed by the winds and the current. It gets its name from its air bladder, which looks similar to the sails of a fighting ship of the 14th and 15th centuries. Name the creature.

5*

• Depiction of a major event

in the Mahabharata.

• (a) Identify the ritual

• (b) What is its significance?

6

• The man in the picture is also known as the father of Indian ornithology, but we know him better as someone who was a political reformer and whose contribution played a major role in Indian independence movement.

• Identify.

7Identify the

European depicted

in the stamp.

8*

• X Lake Temple is a temple built in the middle of a lake in, kasarkode, at around 6 km from Kumble. This is the only lake temple in Kerala and is believed to be the original seat of Y. The temple lake is also home to a crocodile named Babiya, which, local people believe, guards the temple. The lake in which the Sanctum Sanctorum is built measures about 2 acres. An interesting spot to keep in mind while visiting the temple is a cave to the right corner of the lake. According to the local legend, the deity X chose to go all the way to Z through that cave. Hence both the places retain similar names, in spite of being on either end of the region. Give me X or Y.

9

• Name the small village in West Bengal, where a leftist section of CPI(M) headed by Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal led a militant peasant uprising in 1967, trying to develop a "revolutionary opposition" in order to establish "revolutionary rule" in India.

10* Give me the name of a

fruit.

11

• This scientist, whose eponymous contraption was immortalized in a Joseph Wright of Derby oil-on-canvas, described the experiment on an avian thus:

• ..… the Bird for a while appeared lively enough; but upon a greater Ex suction of the Air, she began manifestly to droop and appear sick, and very soon after was taken with as violent and irregular Convulsions, as are wont to be observed in Poultry, when their heads are wrung off: For the Bird threw her self over and over two or three times, and dyed with her Breast upward, her Head downwards, and her Neck awry‖. Identify the scientist

12*

• Palaeontologist Krill Yeskov‘s The Last Ringbearer is an unauthorized sequel to a popular book series based on the premise that the original text needs closer examination to generate alternate views.

• The book is narrated from the perspective of the residents of which land ?

13

• X wrote The Art of Compounding, which was first published in 1895 and has gone through at least 8 editions. The book was used as a pharmacological reference up until the 1960s. X also wrote Extract and Perfumes, which contained hundreds of formulations. However X is mainly known for something he devised while he was working in Parke davis pharmaceutical company. Give me X.

14

• Walking with Lions – Tales from a Diplomatic

Past is a memoir by an author recently much

in the news. Its title refers to the author’s visit

to the court of ruler X, who was known to raise

lions and have them around his palace. In fact,

one of X’s titles was ‘Lion of the Tribe of

Judah’.

• Identify the author and who is X?

15*

• Logo of the national airline of an Asian country.

• Name(a) the country

• (b) the airlines.

16*World’s first

adventure

revolving around

the ____________

FITB or Give me

the theme of the

book.

17

• In Nov 2014, India began celebrating the 125th birth year of its first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1988, in tribute to his centenary year, what first began at New Delhi and ended at Jhansi?

18

• Harvard scientists have built the world's first working Transformer robot, inspired by the ancient art of X.

• The alien robots that feature in the Transformer movies conceal their true nature by taking on the form of cars and trucks. The scientists' robot has yet to reach that level of technical deception and disguises itself – for now, at least – as a robot that has been flattened.

• Footage from the researchers' laboratory shows a sheet of paper and plastic mounted with batteries and motors that folds itself into a working machine without human intervention and then scuttles out of shot.

• The flat-pack robot uses "shape memory polymers" that contract like muscles when they are heated. The robot takes about four minutes to assemble from scratch and can walk at a speed of around 5cm per second.

• Give me X.

19

• Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr. was a brigadier general in the United States Air Force. Tibbets enlisted in the United States Army in 1937 and qualified as a pilot in 1938. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he flew anti-submarine patrols over the Atlantic.

• In 1945 he immortalized his mother, _____ ___ Tibbets by his actions that are remembered even today.

• Name Paul’s mother, and what did he do?

20*

• X was a friend and colleague of the Sanskritist Bohtlingk, who was preparing the second edition of his book on Y, a famous Indian at about this time, and X wished to honor Y with including his concepts for resolving some anomalies in something he has devised.

• X showed his appreciation and debt to the Sanskrit grammarians of ancient India, who had created sophisticated theories of language based on their discovery of the two-dimensional patterns in basic sounds.

• A very popular Russian story also says that it was X who came up with the 40% standard strength of vodka in 1894, after having been appointed Director of the Bureau of Weights and Measures with the assignment to formulate new state standards for the production of vodka.

• Identify X and Y.

21Google doodle

depicting the birth

anniversary of

_____________

FITB.

22*

• The largest permanents scale model of X is situated in Y. The _____ is represented by the Ericsson globe in stockholm, the largest hemispherical building in the world. The ______ can also be found in Stockholm but the _______are situated northward in other cities along the Baltic sea.

• The system was started by Nils Brenning and Gösta Gahm and is on the scale of 1:20 million.

• Give X and Y (name of a country)

23

• This logo from Indian

sports was designed to

indicate the four

essential qualities

required by a player

playing the sport:

strength, strategy, speed

and stamina.

• First held in 2014, what

is this the logo of?

242014 flick which

outlines the

origin and

yesteryears of a

world famous

organization X

Give me X.

25*

• Immediately after the Liaquat–Nehru Pact was

signed in 1950, two ministers resigned from

Nehru’s cabinet. One was Sri KC Neogy.

• Who was the other, who established a new

party within a year?

26

• Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell and William Moerner won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy (SRFM),” which enables scientists to observe individual cells and molecules in high resolution. However, the electron microscope has been available for decades to observe structures of comparable size.

• Where does SRFM score over electron microscopy?

27

• M.K Gandhi and Jyothirao phule were

popularly known as ‘Mahatma’.

• Who was addressed by the masses as

‘Mahamana’ who was also one among the

founders of the scout movement in India?

28

• Identify the Goan depicted in this statue outside a street in panjim, considered as one among the pioneers of Hypnotism.

• In which classic was he depicted almost 50 years after his death in 1819 ?

29

• During the 19th century the area was home to

a British royal artillery armoury, where, in the

early 1890s, Captain Neville Bertie

clay developed a bullet with the jacket cut

away at the tip to reveal its soft lead core

known informally as a ________ or more

correctly as an expanding bullet.

• Which place are we referring to?

30*

• Depicted here is the state flag of a British overseas territory named after the Umayyad general Tariq bin ziyad.

• Name it.

31

• X’s idea to offer ________ came to him while "walking from Market

Harborough to Leicester to attend a meeting of the Temperance

Society“. With the opening of the extended Midlands counties railway , he

arranged to take a group of 540 temperance campaigners from Leicester

Campbell railway station to a rally in Loughborough, eleven miles away.

On 5 July 1841, X arranged for the rail company to charge one shilling per

person that included rail tickets and food for this train journey. X was paid

a share of the fares actually charged to the passengers, as the railway

tickets, being legal contracts between company and passenger, could not

have been issued at his own price. This was the first privately chartered

_____ to be advertised to the general public.

• Give me X , considered as the founder of something very common these

days who has a company which avails similar services named after him.