1) Planet Parade: This is the phenomenon wherein the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were visible to the naked eye from Earth.
- This planetary meet-up, also known as a conjunction, makes the two planets appear close together or even touch in the Earth’s night sky.
- Despite being millions of kilometers apart, the planets seem to occupy the same space in the night sky because of their alignment.
2) 13th Amendment to the Constitution of Sri Lanka: It is an outcome of the India-Sri Lanka Peace Accord of July 1987, to resolve Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict that had aggravated into a full-fledged civil war, between the armed forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
- The 13th Amendment, led to the creation of Provincial Councils.
- It assured a power sharing arrangement to enable all nine provinces in the country, including Sinhala majority areas, to self-govern.
- Subjects such as education, health, agriculture, housing, land and police are devolved to the provincial administrations.
- It made Tamil one of Sri Lanka’s official languages and English, a link language.
- The amendment has never been fully implemented because of the overriding powers given to the President.
3) Gold Exchange Traded Funds (Gold ETFs): They are commodity-based exchange-traded funds with an underlying asset as gold. They are passive investment instruments that are based on gold prices and invest in gold bullion.
- Gold ETFs are units representing physical gold which may be in paper or dematerialised form.
- Gold ETFs combine the flexibility of stock investment and the simplicity of gold investments.
- They are listed and traded on the National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) and Bombay Stock Exchange Ltd. (BSE) like a stock of any company.
- It can be bought and sold continuously at market prices.
- There is a complete transparency on the holdings of a Gold ETF due to its direct gold pricing.
- ETFs have much lower expenses as compared to physical gold investments.
4) SAFAR: It is an air quality monitoring system, introduced by the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) to provide location specific information on air quality in near real time and its forecast upto 3 days in India. It is developed by Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune.
- Objective: To increase awareness among the general public regarding the air quality changes in their city well in advance so that appropriate mitigation measures and systematic action can be taken up for betterment of air quality and related health issues.
- AQI is calculated based on the average concentration of a particular pollutant measured over a standard time interval (24 hours for most pollutants, 8 hours for carbon monoxide and ozone).
5) Haiderpur wetland: It is a human-made wetland that was formed in 1984 by the construction of the Madhya Ganga Barrage on a floodplain of the River Ganga in Uttar Pradesh.
- It is located within the boundaries of Hastinapur Wildlife Sanctuary.
- It has been recognized as the 47th Ramsar site of India in 2021.
