Famous Personalities Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The correct match is a-3, b-4, c-2, d-1.

• Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy (3).
• Jacques Cartier, who explored the St Lawrence, was born in Saint-Malo, France (4).
• Sir Francis Drake was born in Devon, England, in the United Kingdom (2).
• Ferdinand Magellan was born in Portugal, though he sailed for Spain (1).

The trap is Magellan and Columbus, who sailed under the Spanish flag; neither was born in Spain.

Answer: A

The lines are Rabindranath Tagore's.

Tagore wrote that a teacher can never truly teach unless he is still learning himself, as a lamp can never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its own flame. The passage expresses his view that the teacher must be a lifelong learner who keeps knowledge alive rather than repeating lessons.

Gandhi, Dewey and Lincoln wrote on education and learning, but this passage is Tagore's.

Answer: A

The answer is A is correct but B is wrong.

Statement A is correct. Neil Armstrong, commander of Apollo 11, became the first person to walk on the Moon on 20-21 July 1969, followed by Buzz Aldrin.

Statement B is wrong. Kalpana Chawla died in February 2003, when the space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry, so she could not have set a record in 2007. The woman who set the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman in 2007 was Sunita Williams, during her stay on the International Space Station.

Answer: B

He was imprisoned for opposing apartheid and struggling against policies of segregation.

Apartheid was the system of racial segregation in South Africa, under which black and coloured people were kept apart from whites and denied equal rights. Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress led the struggle against it, and the apartheid government imprisoned him along with thousands of others. He was released in 1990 and became South Africa's first democratically elected President in 1994.

He was not fighting a king or a royal monarchy, he was not jailed for an ordinary offence, and his struggle was not a bid for powerful positions in government. Those options misrepresent why he was imprisoned.

Answer: B

Ambedkar converted to Buddhism.

Dr B. R. Ambedkar rejected the caste system that Hinduism, as practised, imposed on Dalits. On 14 October 1956, at Nagpur, he embraced Buddhism together with several hundred thousand of his followers, because Buddhism rejects caste and stresses equality. He died a few weeks later, in December 1956.

He did not convert to Jainism, the Bahai faith or Sikhism. He had considered Sikhism in the 1930s, but finally chose Buddhism, which he set out in The Buddha and His Dhamma.

Answer: B

The person was Rosa Parks.

In December 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger. Her arrest led to the Montgomery bus boycott and became a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement for equal rights for African-Americans, in which Martin Luther King Jr. rose to prominence.

The other names are distractors. Rosa Luxemburg was a German socialist revolutionary killed in 1919, Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, and Nelson Mandela led the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

Answer: A

The key is (i) and (iii), Ramanujan and Varahmihir. I could not confirm this from a standard reference, and nothing I found shows it wrong.

The only answer I found for this item is a coaching site that gives the same key, and its reasoning is thin: it links Varahmihira's astronomical calculations and Ramanujan's rapidly converging series for pi to approximation methods, which are the business of numerical analysis. 'Founder of numerical analysis' is not a standard historical attribution for any of the four, so the question depends on the examiner's source.

The other options pair Bhaskaracharya or Aryabhatta with another name. Both are famous for important mathematical work (Aryabhatta for his Aryabhatiya and sine tables, Bhaskaracharya for the Lilavati and Bijaganita), but they are not named as the founders in the keyed answer. The explanation here records the Board's key and the reservation, and does not claim more than that.

Answer: B

M. K. Vainu Bappu (Manali Kuppuswamy Vainu Bappu) is known as the Father of Modern Indian Astronomy. He directed the Kodaikanal Observatory, co-discovered the Bappu-Bok-Newkirk comet, formulated the Wilson-Bappu effect and led the creation of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics and the Kavalur observatory. Jayant Narlikar is known for cosmology and the steady-state theory, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar for the Chandrasekhar limit, and Thanu Padmanabhan for gravitation and cosmology. The title in the question belongs to Bappu.

Answer: C

The Statue of Unity depicts Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. The 182 metre statue stands near Kevadia in Gujarat and was inaugurated on 31 October 2018, Patel's birth anniversary. Patel is remembered for the integration of the princely states into India.

Nehru, Rajendra Prasad and Lal Bahadur Shastri are not shown by this statue.

Answer: B

Hitendra Desai was known in politics.

He was Chief Minister of Gujarat from 1965 to 1971, the state's third, and later a Union Minister.