UPSC Prelims 2018 · Question 64 of 99

UPSC Prelims 2018 question on Belle II Blockchain CRISPR Contexts

Consider the following pairs: Terms sometimes seen in news Context/Topic

1. Belle II experiment - Artificial Intelligence
2. Blockchain technology - Digital/Cryptocurrency
3. CRISPR-Cas9 - Particle Physics

Which of the pairs given above is/are correctly matched?

  1. 1 and 3 only
  2. 2 only
  3. 2 and 3 only
  4. 1, 2 and 3
Show answer

Answer: B. 2 only

Analysis

Only pair 2 is correctly matched, so the answer is (b) 2 only.

Statement by statement

Pair 1 is INCORRECT. The Belle II experiment is a particle physics experiment designed to study the properties of B mesons, heavy particles containing a bottom quark. It succeeds the Belle experiment and is being commissioned at the SuperKEKB accelerator complex at KEK in Tsukuba, Japan. It has nothing to do with artificial intelligence.

Pair 2 is CORRECT. The primary use of blockchains today is as a distributed ledger for cryptocurrencies, most notably bitcoin, and several central banks have studied issuing their own digital currencies.

Pair 3 is INCORRECT. CRISPR-Cas9, short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and CRISPR-associated protein 9, is a genome editing tool, not a particle physics subject.

Source

The Hindu reports on the Belle II collaboration and on the use of blockchain.

How to crack it

Notice that pairs 1 and 3 have simply been swapped, since Belle II is the particle physics item and CRISPR is the biology item. Detecting a swapped pair is faster than evaluating each independently, and once you see it both fall together, leaving only pair 2. Scan a matching set for exchanged contexts before working through it in order.

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