Awards and Honours Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The correct order is 3, 1, 4, 2.

1. Ekal Abhiyan Trust: Gandhi Peace Prize for 2017.
2. Yohei Sasakawa (spelt 'Yohel' in the paper), the Japanese philanthropist known for leprosy work: 2018.
3. Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said of Oman: 2019, awarded after his death.
4. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of Bangladesh: 2020, also posthumous.

The 2019 and 2020 prizes were announced together in March 2021, which is the usual trap. Options starting with Sasakawa, Qaboos or Mujibur all put a later award first.

Answer: C

The correct matching is A-4, B-1, C-2, D-3.

All four won Nobel Prizes in 2020.

• Jennifer Doudna shared the Chemistry prize with Emmanuelle Charpentier for the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing method.
• Robert B. Wilson shared the Economics prize with Paul Milgrom for improvements to auction theory.
• Andrea M. Ghez shared the Physics prize with Reinhard Genzel (and Roger Penrose) for discovering the supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.
• Louise Gluck won the Literature prize for her poetry.

Answer: A

The film was The Elephant Whisperers.

Directed by Kartiki Gonsalves and produced by Guneet Monga, The Elephant Whisperers follows a couple in Tamil Nadu's Mudumalai Tiger Reserve who raise an orphaned elephant calf. At the 95th Academy Awards in March 2023 it won Best Documentary Short Film, the first Indian production to win in that category.

Everything Everywhere All at Once won Best Picture that year and All Quiet on the Western Front won Best International Feature; neither is Indian. Kartiki Gonsalves is the director, not the film.

Answer: D

The award went to Mohanlal (Mohanlal Vishwanathan).

The Malayalam actor Mohanlal received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for 2023, presented at the 71st National Film Awards ceremony in September 2025.

Asha Parekh (2020), Waheeda Rehman (2021) and Mithun Chakraborty (2022) were the three previous recipients, which is the trap in the options.

The Dadasaheb Phalke Award, India's highest award in cinema, was instituted in 1969 and named after the maker of India's first full-length feature film, Raja Harishchandra (1913).

Answer: A

The Padma Vibhushan of 2025 went to Osamu Suzuki.

Osamu Suzuki, the former chairman of Suzuki Motor Corporation who partnered with the Indian government to create Maruti Udyog, was awarded the Padma Vibhushan posthumously in the 2025 Padma awards.

Bibek Debroy, Pankaj Udhas and Manohar Joshi were honoured with the Padma Bhushan in 2025, the third-highest civilian award, not the Padma Vibhushan.

Answer: C

The best non-feature film was Flowering Man.

At the 71st National Film Awards, announced on 1 August 2025, the best non-feature film award went to Flowering Man, a Hindi short film directed by Soumyajit Ghosh Dastidar and produced by the Film and Television Institute of India.

12th Fail won best feature film and Hanu-Man won awards in the feature film section, so neither was the non-feature winner.

Answer: C

The one who was not a 2019 recipient is Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee received the Bharat Ratna in 2015, together with Madan Mohan Malaviya.

The awards announced in January 2019 went to former President Pranab Mukherjee, and posthumously to the singer and composer Bhupen Hazarika and the social reformer Nanaji Deshmukh, so the other three options are 2019 recipients.

Answer: A

The archaeologist is Smt. Sharada Srinivasan.

Sharada Srinivasan, a professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru, is an archaeologist and archaeometallurgist known for her scientific study of South Indian bronzes, early high-tin bronze and wootz steel. She received the Padma Shri in 2019 for her work in archaeology.

The other three are scholars of Indian art and culture, but they were not the 2019 Padma Shri awardee in archaeology from Karnataka that the question asks about.

Answer: C

The 2019 Kendra Sahitya Akademi award for Kannada went to Dr. Vijaya.

The Sahitya Akademi announced its 2019 awards in December 2019, and the Kannada award went to the writer and journalist Vijaya for her autobiography Kudi Esaru.

K.G. Nagarajappa, K.V. Tirumalesh and Rahamat Tarikere are well-known Kannada writers, but none of them was the Kannada awardee for 2019.

Answer: C

The 2018 Basava Puraskara went to H.S. Doreswamy.

The Basava Puraskara is given by the Government of Karnataka for achievement in literature, social justice and harmony. The list of recipients gives Patil Puttappa for 2017, H.S. Doreswamy (independence activist, social worker and journalist) for 2018 and Chandrashekhar Patil for 2019.

Patil Puttappa and Chandrashekar Patil won it in the neighbouring years, so they are wrong for 2018. M.M. Kalaburgi is not the 2018 recipient.