Current Affairs Quiz 09 September 2026

Statements 1 and 3 are correct. DEH is implemented through the DGFT under the Department of Commerce, and DEPCs at the district level prepare the DEAPs, which map export-worthy products, assess infrastructure gaps, and recommend competitiveness measures. Statement 2 is incorrect, since DEH is actually a convergence framework rather than a separate funding scheme, leveraging funding already available under ongoing central and state schemes instead of carrying a dedicated budget line of its own. Whenever a statement claims a fresh financial outlay for an initiative explicitly termed a convergence or coordination mechanism, it is worth treating that as a red flag, since a convergence framework typically means no separate outlay, while a scheme usually does.

Both statements are correct. The FAO Sugar Price Index is a recognised international benchmark that rose 5.6% in July, signalling tightening global supply, and Brazil is the world's largest sugar producer, with India's sugar imports predominantly coming from Brazil, meaning a Brazilian production shortfall directly affects India's import options. Aspirants often assume a "which is correct" pair contains one true and one plausible-sounding false statement, hunting for a flaw in Statement 2, but here both are simply true and independently verifiable, making the real trap over-thinking a straightforward pair rather than manufacturing a flaw where the source gives none.

A performance-linked grant of ₹16,425 crore has been provided to 130 NCAP cities as critical gap funding to implement air-pollution mitigation measures, the funding route highlighted at the event, distinct from loans, staff deputation, or any carbon-trading mechanism, none of which NCAP employs. The other three options are plausible-sounding generic governance mechanisms used elsewhere in Indian federalism, loans, deputation, and market instruments, but are not how NCAP itself is funded, a classic distractor-by-substitution trap using mechanisms real elsewhere just not here. It is worth always matching the mechanism to the specific scheme rather than to what merely "sounds government-like."

Khagantak-243 is the indigenous glide bomb whose first flight trial was conducted from a Su-30MKI, DRDO's Gaurav is a separate, heavier (1,000 kg) long-range glide bomb trialled in April 2025, SPICE and HAMMER are imported precision-guided munitions whose use during Operation Sindoor underscored the operational importance of stand-off weapons, and BEL partnered with start-up JSR Dynamics under the Development-cum-Production Partner model to develop Khagantak-243. The distractor codes swap Khagantak-243 and Gaurav's identities, since both are glide bombs and easy to conflate, and reassign BEL's role to the wrong system, so it helps to keep the two glide-bomb programmes, one DRDO-origin, one start-up-BEL origin, mentally separate by weight class rather than merging programmes just because they share a label.

Both the Assertion and Reason are true, and the Reason correctly explains the Assertion. CosmoCube will orbit the Moon and use it as a natural shield during roughly 40 minutes of radio silence per orbit, while PRATUSH is India's comparable proposed radio telescope or radiometer for lunar orbit, with both targeting the 21-cm neutral-hydrogen signal, buried beneath foreground radio noise thousands of times stronger, precisely the interference the lunar far side blocks out. A tempting wrong choice is treating R as generic background rather than the specific causal justification for choosing the far side, so it is worth checking whether the Reason answers "why this design choice" rather than merely being a true fact sitting near the Assertion, since a causally connected Reason, not merely a topically related one, is what makes it a correct explanation.

Statements 2 and 3 are correct. The Equal Earth design was developed in 2018 by an international team of cartographers, and conformal projections like Mercator preserve true angles, letting navigators plot constant-compass-bearing straight-line courses. Statement 1 is incorrect, since the Mercator projection is actually a conformal projection rather than an equal-area one, preserving angles and local shapes while distorting relative area and inflating high-latitude landmasses. The classic trap is assuming Mercator, being the most familiar and "accurate-looking" world map, must be the equal-area one, when in fact the very property, shape preservation, that makes it useful for navigation is what causes its area distortion elsewhere.

Statement 1 is correct, since India, the US, and China together account for nearly half of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Statement 2 is incorrect, since Nepal actually accounts for less than 0.1% of global emissions, among the lowest of any country, even as it remains highly vulnerable to climate change due to its rapidly melting Himalayan glaciers. The setter exploits proximity bias here, since Nepal being the disaster-affected country in the news might lead aspirants to wrongly infer it is also a major emitter, but the news hook, the disaster, and the underlying static fact, emissions share, point in opposite directions, meaning being the affected party in a climate story does not imply being a large contributor to the cause.

The LAWS definitional text was agreed under talks overseen by the Netherlands, with UN member states set to decide in November, under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, whether to move toward a binding regulatory treaty. The NPT, Wassenaar Arrangement, and MTCR are all real arms-control frameworks but govern different domains, nuclear weapons, dual-use export controls, and missile technology respectively, so the trap lies in matching the right regime to the right weapons category rather than picking any name that "sounds like disarmament." It is worth keeping India's four major arms-control acronyms, NPT, CCW, Wassenaar, and MTCR, mapped to their distinct weapon domains, with LAWS belonging specifically to the CCW.

Statements 1 and 3 are correct. The Census is conducted by State-appointed enumerators under Section 4(2) of the Census Act, 1948, and Principle 6 of the UN's Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics mandates confidentiality of individual statistical data, a principle India has adopted. Statement 2 is incorrect, since a nationality question was actually tried only in the 1951 and 1961 Censuses and was discarded from 1971 onward, meaning it does not feature in every Census since 1961. The false statement is engineered as a plausible half-truth, since nationality genuinely was asked "since 1961" going backward, in 1951 and 1961, but the statement inverts this into an ongoing practice "since 1961" going forward, so it is worth reading direction-of-time claims literally and checking whether a practice continued or was discontinued.

Statements 1 and 2 are correct. Soft corals lack the rigid calcium-carbonate skeleton of hard corals and instead depend on internal fluid pressure for structure, which environmental stress can disrupt, causing them to "slump." Statement 3 is incorrect and a fabricated linkage, since orangutans are native only to the tropical rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra in Indonesia and Malaysia, with no natural association with Indian Ocean coral-reef ecosystems, and their recent recovery in Odisha was from a suspected wildlife-trafficking transit rather than a natural habitat. This question deliberately splices two unrelated "Also in News" items, Jeju soft corals and the Odisha orangutan rescue, into one statement set, borrowing the credibility of two true, verified facts to smuggle in a plausible-sounding but invented ecological claim, so it is worth verifying each statement's origin independently rather than assuming an unrelated nearby current-affairs item makes a claim about it true.