Current General Knowledge

ABBREVIATIONS EDUCATION happy with the changes.

NAMICA: Nag Missile Carrier.
NIT: National Institute of
Technology.
10 RECs to be upgraded to NITs
T HE Regional Engineering Colleges
(RECs) are to be upgraded to National
PERSONS
Kalam, A.P.J. Abdul

BOOKS
Ignited Minds: Unleashing the
Institutes of Technology (NITs) with
management control passing from hands
of State governments to a board of
A VUL Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul
Kalam, father of India’s missile
programme, is the NDA’s candidate for
power within India governors comprising professionals. The the post of President of India. A brilliant

W RITTEN by Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam,

the book tackles the scientists’
favourite theme, that of engaging minds
of children and building resources for the
future. It is a sequel to his “India 2020: A
vision for the future” that offers a
blueprint for elevating India.
Some of his ideas stress on the
necessity for a patriotism that transcends
religion and politics, for role models who
point out the path to take, and for
confidence in oneself and in one’s
institutes will be funded entirely by the
Centre.
The first 10 RECs selected are:
Allahabad, Bhopal, Calicut, Hamirpur,
Jaipur, Kurukshetra, Nagpur, Rourkela,
Surathkal and Silchar. They will also be
granted “deemed university” status.
US overhauls SAT format
T HE College Board of USA has
formally announced that it was
undertaking a major overhaul of the SAT
and non-controversial person, who has
risen to be the greatest in his field throu-
gh sheer hard work, talent and perseve-
rance, is to many a contemporary here.
Born at Dhanushkodi, Tamil Nadu,
on October 15, 1931, Mr Kalam did B.Sc
from St Joseph’s College, Tiruchirapalli.
He is the first from his family to get a
graduation degree. He then studied
aeronautical engineering at IIT, Madras.

strengths. test. The board also revealed new details

of its plans to make SAT, the leading
DEFENCE college entrance exam in the US, into a
Anti-tank Nag missiles test-fired three and a half hour test.

T WO Nag anti-tank guided missiles

were test-fired on June 21, 2002, from
the Interim Test Range at Chandipur on
Sea. The long awaited Nag (cobra) is a
third generation, top-attack, fire and
forget missile.
Nag is one of the five missile systems
being developed by the Defence Research
and Development Organisation (DRDO)
under its integrated Guided Missile
Development Programme (IGMDP).
The missiles were test-fired from
special containers in clear weather
conditions to establish their advanced
manoeuvrability and top attack trajectory
along with other parameters. Design
work on the 6-km range Nag started in
1988, and it was first test-fired in
November 1990.
The land version will be fired from a
tracked vehicle labelled the Nag Missile
Carrier (NAMICA), which is a modified
BMP-2 infantry combat vehicle. The
missile is also being configured to be
fired from the Advanced Light Helicopter
(ALH). The helicopter version was test-
fired from a modified Mi-17 helicopter in
March 1998.
The revised test, which will not be
given until March 2005, will be made up
of three sections, each scored on a 200 to
800 scale, and each differing at least
somewhat from the current verbal and
math sections. The math test will cover
an additional year of high school math
and the format of the questions will be
new. The verbal test, renamed the critical
reading test, will also have different
kinds of questions, eliminating the verbal
analogies and quantitative comparisons
that have been mainstays of SAT
courses. The most striking change is the
new writing test, including both an essay
and multiple choice grammar and copy-
editing questions.
Many college admissions officers
said they felt this would spur high
schools to emphasise good writing skills.
The essays, designed to assess basic
writing skills, not creativity, will be
scored based on criteria like sentence
structure and grammar errors.
The new test is likely to pose special
problems for immigrants and others
whose first language is not English, and
some advocates for those groups are not
Under Kalam’s stewardship, India’s
missile development programme took
rapid strides, culminating in the
successful launches of the Trishul, Prithvi,
Agni, Nag and Akash missiles. The
crowning glory came with the Pokhran II
nuclear tests. He was conferred the
nation’s highest civilian honour, the
Bharat Ratna, in 1997. He had been
honoured with the Padma Vibhushan in
1990 and the Padma Bhushan in 1981.
Kalam quotes with equal ease from
the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita, plays the
veena, writes poetry in Tamil and
admires Subrahmanya Bharati. He never
married.
Sehgal, Lakshmi
A N associate of Netaji Subhash
Chandra Bose, she was the nominee
of the Left parties for the election to the
post of President of India.

109 ! AUGUST 2002 ! THE COMPETITION MASTER

 A Padma Vibhushan awardee, she is
the first woman to contest for the top
political post of India. As a young girl
she had participated in the nationalist
movement and led the Rani Jhansi
regiment of Netaji. She became active in
Left politics after the 1971 war.
PLACES
Tehzeeb Mahal
I T is a first of its kind in Asia. The Rs
3.63 crore modern heritage emporium,
being built in Srinagar, is a double
storeyed air-conditioned complex spread
over 15,000 sq feet area. The complex will
house an art gallery, an art museum, an
auditorium, a show room and sundry
facilities that will widen the scope of
cultural and craft exchanges in Srinagar.
Tehzeeb Mahal is being designed as
part of countrywide chain of 22 Kashmir
arts emporia, run by J & K Handicrafts
(Sales and Exports) Corporation.
RESEARCH
Get ready for laser travel
I N a breakthrough out of the realms of
Star Trek, scientists in Australia have
successfully teleported a laser beam of
light from one spot to another in a split
second.
A team of physicists at the
Australian National University (ANU)
successfully disembodied a laser beam at
one location and rebuilt it at a different
spot about one metre away, at the blink
of an eye. Project leader Ping Koy Lam
said there was a close resemblance
between what his team had achieved and
the movement of people in the science
fiction series Star Trek, but reality was still
light years away—beaming human
beings between locations.
However, the breakthrough opens up
enormous possibilities for future super fast
and super secure communications systems,
such as quantum computers. Physicists
believe quantum com-puters could
outperform classical computers with enor-
mous memory and the ability to solve
problems million times faster.
SPACE RESEARCH
Stuck in space, US astronauts set
record
T WO US astronauts woke up on June
13, 2002, with a record they never
expected when they left Earth in
December—the American milestone for
space flight endurance.
Carl Walz and Daniel Bursch passed
the 188-day mark in space during their
overnight sleep period, pushing them
ahead of astronaut Shannon Lucid, who
stayed six months on the Russian space
station Mir in 1996.
Robot spacecraft to probe comets
N ASA is preparing to launch a
spacecraft whose mission is to make
the closest observations ever of the frozen
cores of comets and to stand ready to be
diverted if a newly discovered comet
passes near the Earth.
The robot spacecraft, called Contour,
for Comet Nucleus Tour, is part of an
armada of international probes being sent
forth to solve some of the mysteries of
these icy bodies that traverse the solar
system and may have played a major role
in the evolution of Earth.
If successful, Contour will make the
most detailed observations ever of the
nuclei of two very different types of
comets as they make their closest
approaches to the Sun and are most
active.
On November 12, 2003, the
spacecraft is to fly by an older, less active
comet called Encke, which was first
spotted in 1786.
Then, on June 19, 2006, Contour will
visit the more active and younger
Schwassman-Wachmann 3, a comet
discovered in 1930, that broke into
several pieces in 1995, perhaps exposing
pristine inner material.
MISCELLANEOUS
How is the Indian President
elected?
T HE President is elected by an
electoral college consisting
of the elected members of both
Houses of Parliament and the
elected members of the Legislative
Assemblies of the States. Only
elected members from part of the
electoral college, not those nominated to
any of the relevant legislative bodies. For
the forthcoming presidential elections,
there are a total of 4,896 electors,
consisting of 543 Lok Sabha members,
233 Rajya Sabha members and 4,120
110 ! AUGUST 2002 ! THE COMPETITION MASTER
MLAs.
A formula laid down in the
Constitution determines the
number of votes each elector commands.
The basic principle governing the
formula is of proportional
representation. In other words, the
attempt is to ensure that each legislator’s
votes reflect the population he actually
represents.
The formula attempts to achieve this
as follows: The population of each State
is divided by 1,000 and then by the
number of elected MLAs in the State
assembly. The number thus derived
is the value of each MLA’s votes from
that State. The system also tries to ensure
a balance between the value of votes of
parliamentarians and State legislators.
Hence, the next part of the formula takes
this number—549,474—and divides it by
the total number of elected MPs, which is
776, to work out the value of each MP’s
votes. This, after rounding off, yields a
figure of 708 votes per MP. Hence, the
total value of all MPs’ votes equals 708
multiplied by 776, which is 549,408. The
grand total of votes in the electoral
college thus adds up to 1,098,882 a little
over a million.
The population figure to be
considered is the relevant census tally
under the Constitution. However, since
the 1974 presidential elections, the 1971
census has formed the basis for the
calculation.
Each elector marks his ordered
preference for the candidates in the fray.
At the first count, only the first
preference votes are tallied. If any of the
candidates at this stage secures more
than the required “quota” of votes, he or
she wins. The “quota” is simply one
more than half the total valid votes
polled by all the candidates put together,
that is a majority of votes. If no
candidate reaches the quota after the first
round of counting, the candidate
with the least votes at that stage is
eliminated and the second preference
marked by those voting for him are
added on to the votes of the relevant
candidates. This process is
continued with each subsequent
round till one of the candidates
reaches the “quota” and is declared the
winner.