1) Black swan event: it is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences.
- Black swan events are characterized by their extreme rarity, severe impact, and the widespread insistence they were obvious in hindsight.
- Such events can be either positive or negative. E.g. the advent of the internet was such a positive watershed event which changed the way people look and live.
2) Juneteenth: the portmanteau of June and nineteenth– is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the US, observed on June 19 every year.
- It is also known as Emancipation Day or Juneteenth Independence Day.
- On January 1, 1863, then-president Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that “all persons held as slaves” free. However, slavery still continued.
- On June 19, 1865, two months after the Civil War had ended, Major General Gordon Granger, from the victorious Union side, arrived in Galveston, Texas, and issued an order to free the last enslaved people on US soil.
3) Spectrum auctions: Devices such as cellphones and wireline telephones require signals to connect from one end to another. These signals are carried on airwaves (medium of radio waves), which must be sent at designated frequencies to avoid any kind of interference.
- Interference may prevent reception altogether, may cause only a temporary loss of a signal
- The Union government owns all the publicly available assets within the geographical boundaries of the country, which also include airwaves.
- The central government through the Department of Telecom (Ministry of Communications) auctions these airwaves from time to time.
- These airwaves are called spectrum, which is subdivided into bands which have varying frequencies.
- All these airwaves are sold for a certain period of time, after which their validity lapses, which is generally set at 20 years.
4) Palm oil: Palm oil is currently the world’s most consumed vegetable oil.
- Palm oil is an edible vegetable oil derived from the mesocarp (reddish pulp) of the fruit of the oil palms.
- It is resistant to oxidation and so can give products a longer shelf-life; it’s stable at high temperatures
- It is used extensively in the production of detergents, plastics, cosmetics, and biofuels.
- Indonesia is the largest producer of palm oil, followed by Malaysia. Top consumers of the commodity are India, China, and the European Union (EU).
5) Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS): BIS is the National Standards Body of India working under the aegis of the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution.
- It is established by the Bureau of Indian Standards Act, 1986
- It governs all the industrial standardization and the industrial product certifications in India. It is thus a national standards organization of India.
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