Current Affairs Quiz 24 August 2026

Statements 1 and 2 are correct, while Statements 3 and 4 are wrong. The narwhal tusk is indeed an enlarged upper left incisor present in about 90% of males, made of dentin with millions of fluid-filled tubules that give it sensory sensitivity to salinity, temperature, and pressure. New research actually found the outer layer twists left (anticlockwise) and the inner layer twists right, the reverse of what Statement 3 claims, and this opposing-twist arrangement is what creates the internal tension keeping the tusk straight, while the narwhal is listed under CITES Appendix II, allowing regulated rather than prohibited trade. For CITES-related statements, it helps to verify direction and appendix level separately, since Appendix I bars commercial trade for species like tigers and rhinos while Appendix II merely regulates it for species like the narwhal and hippo.

Statements 1 and 2 are correct, while Statements 3 and 4 are wrong. The 1-in-10,000 casualty risk threshold and the requirement that non-Indian operators route re-entry activity through an Indian-incorporated entity are both accurately stated. The required advance notice for the IN-SPACe advisory note is actually at least 45 days, not 30 days, before re-entry begins, and the guidelines do the opposite of Statement 4, requiring operators to undertake planned re-entries at their own risk and remain liable for third-party damage, effectively indemnifying rather than burdening the Government of India. It is worth remembering that the Space Liability Convention, 1972 places absolute liability on the launching state internationally, but India's IN-SPACe guidelines shift this operational liability onto the private operator instead.

Assertion A is true — the Bhitardari chert from the Singhbhum Craton in Jharkhand and Odisha has been reported in PNAS as containing convergent chemical evidence of microbial life dating to roughly 3,497 million years ago, making it the oldest directly dated rock with a confirmed biosignature per the study's authors. Reason R is false, since chert itself cannot be dated directly, as its silica matrix yields no reliable radiometric clock; researchers instead extracted zircons, hardy uranium-bearing crystals, from apparent volcanic ash within the chert formation and applied U-Pb dating to those zircons, whose age was then taken as the age of the surrounding chert. The key distinction worth internalising is between dating the host rock directly versus dating co-deposited minerals within it, and in geology or science questions it always pays to scrutinise exactly what material is being dated or measured.

Statement 1 is correct on its central figure, since the 2023 mapping exercise did document 150 elephant corridors, though the actual spread is across 15 states rather than 14. Statement 2 is incorrect, since the Central Empowered Committee was not constituted under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972 but rather by the Supreme Court of India in the T.N. Godavarman Thirumalpad case (1996/2002), making it a judicial creation rather than a statutory body enacted by Parliament. The CEC is one of India's most frequently tested conservation bodies, and the most common trap is calling it "statutory" when it is in fact judicial — for every conservation body, it is worth fixing whether it is statutory, regulatory, or judicial in origin.

Statements 1 and 3 are correct, while Statements 2 and 4 are wrong. Mikania micrantha is indeed among the world's fastest-growing vines and native to Central and South America, and the Khalingduar Reserve Forest lies in Udalguri district within the Bodoland Territorial Region, which borders Bhutan. Biochar is actually produced through pyrolysis, heating organic material in a controlled environment with little or no oxygen, since the presence of oxygen would cause combustion to ash rather than pyrolysis, and the project is implemented by Aaranyak, a Guwahati-based biodiversity conservation NGO, rather than the Wildlife Institute of India, a government research institute under MoEFCC. A simple rule to remember: biochar equals pyrolysis equals low oxygen equals stable carbon, so any statement claiming biochar production involves burning with oxygen is false.

"Chipflation" was coined by Morgan Stanley analysts in June 2026 to describe how AI's surging demand for advanced memory chips, especially High Bandwidth Memory for data centres, is diverting manufacturing capacity away from consumer electronics and causing sharp price rises in smartphones, ACs, TVs, fridges, and other consumer devices. Option A instead describes the historical trend of Moore's Law cost reduction, a trend that chipflation is actually reversing, while option C is fabricated since MoSPI has not developed any such semiconductor-specific index, and option D has no factual basis. In "term in news" questions the correct option typically captures both the underlying mechanism and its effect, and here that means AI demand diversion driving up consumer prices rather than the reverse.

Assertion A is true — PLFS 2025 records rural FLFPR at 45.9% against urban FLFPR at 27.7%, confirming that rural participation substantially exceeds urban. Reason R contains two errors: the PLFS is actually conducted by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, not the Ministry of Labour and Employment, and it primarily uses the Usual Status approach with a one-year reference period as its headline measure, rather than the Current Daily Status, which is only one of three approaches used alongside Current Weekly Status but is not the primary metric for published FLFPR figures. It is worth fixing both anchors together: PLFS belongs to MoSPI, and its primary metric is Usual Status with a yearly reference period.

Statements 1, 2 and 4 are correct, while Statement 3 inverts the proposal's core argument. The UPI analogy of an open protocol with private apps is central to the proposal, APAAR ID is indeed envisaged under NEP 2020 as an academic credit bank identifier, and the DEPA and Account Aggregator consent framework is proposed to make the student, rather than the platform, the owner of their learning data. The proposal explicitly argues the government should not try to build the best learning app, stating it will not win that race and should not attempt it, with the state's role instead confined to building the protocol, aggregating demand, and credentialing outcomes while leaving content and application development to the private sector. A useful frame to hold onto: in DPI debates, the state's role is infrastructure, standards, and credentialing, while the private role is content, apps, and last-mile delivery.

Statements 1, 2 and 4 are correct, while Statement 3 reverses the actual ruling. The Bijoe Emmanuel siblings, Jehovah's Witnesses, were expelled for standing silently rather than singing, and the Supreme Court held that compelled singing violates Article 19(1)(a), since freedom of expression includes the freedom to remain silent, as well as Article 25(1), freedom of conscience, further confirming that respectful silence without disturbance is not an offence under the 1971 Act. The Supreme Court actually held that fundamental duties under Article 51A cannot be used to override fundamental rights under Part III, correcting an error the Kerala High Court had made, since duties remain non-justiciable and subordinate to rights. It is worth fixing this constitutional hierarchy firmly: Article 51A sits in the non-justiciable Part IV-A and cannot override the Part III fundamental rights.

National Space Day is observed on 23 August to mark the date in 2023 when the Chandrayaan-3 mission's Vikram lander successfully touched down on the Moon's south polar region, making India the fourth country to achieve a soft lunar landing and the first to land near the lunar south pole, with the landing point named "Shiv Shakti Point" by the government. Option A is incorrect since Aryabhata was launched on 19 April 1975, option C is incorrect since ISRO was established on 15 August 1969, and option D is incorrect since Gaganyaan's crewed mission had not taken place as of this date. It is worth anchoring the Chandrayaan-3 landing date of 23 August 2023 together with the landing site name Shiv Shakti Point, as both are high-frequency Prelims targets.