Awards and Honours Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Miss International India 2023 was Praveena Anjana.

Praveena Anjana was crowned Miss International India 2023 at the Femina Miss India 2023 pageant, which chooses India's representatives for international contests. The main Femina Miss India title that year went to Nandini Gupta of Rajasthan.

Harnaaz Sandhu won Miss Universe in 2021. The other names are not the 2023 Miss International India.

Answer: A

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Katalin Kariko, jointly with Drew Weissman.

They were honoured for discoveries about nucleoside base modifications that made it possible to develop effective mRNA vaccines, such as those used against COVID-19.

Svante Paabo won the 2022 Physiology or Medicine prize for work on the genomes of extinct hominins. Annie Ernaux won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, and Morten Meldal shared the 2022 Chemistry prize for click chemistry.

Answer: D

The number is Three.

Five people from Rajasthan were honoured in the Padma Awards announced in January 2022. Two received the Padma Bhushan, the Paralympian Devendra Jhajharia and the retired civil servant Rajiv Mehrishi. The remaining three received the Padma Shri: the Paralympic shooter Avani Lekhara, the artist Ramdayal Sharma and the screenwriter Chandraprakash Dwivedi.

Five is the total across both awards, which is why it is a tempting option, and it counts the two Padma Bhushan recipients as well. Two is the number of Padma Bhushan awardees. Four would need one more Padma Shri than the list has.

Answer: D

The 2024 Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna went to Praveen Kumar.

Praveen Kumar is a para high jumper who won gold in the T64 high jump at the Paris 2024 Paralympics. The four Khel Ratna awardees for 2024 were chess player D. Gukesh, hockey captain Harmanpreet Singh, shooter Manu Bhaker and Praveen Kumar.

Mona Aggarwal (para shooting), Annu Rani (javelin) and Jarmanpreet Singh (hockey) are accomplished athletes, but none of them was among the 2024 Khel Ratna recipients.

Answer: A

The Rajasthan awardee is Baijnath Maharaj.

Baijnath Maharaj of Rajasthan was among the Padma Shri awardees announced on the eve of Republic Day 2025, in the field of spiritualism.

The other three were also 2025 Padma Shri awardees, but not from Rajasthan: Anil Kumar Boro is a writer from Assam, Arvind Sharma a scholar of religion based in Canada, and Ratan Kumar Parimoo an art historian and painter from Gujarat.

Answer: C

The person not awarded the Bharat Ratna in 2024 is Lala Hardyal.

Five people were named for the Bharat Ratna in 2024: Karpoori Thakur (former Bihar Chief Minister), Lal Krishna Advani, former Prime Ministers Chaudhary Charan Singh and P.V. Narasimha Rao, and agricultural scientist M.S. Swaminathan.

Lala Har Dayal was a revolutionary and a founder of the Ghadar Party in the United States in 1913. He has not been awarded the Bharat Ratna.

Answer: C

The award went to Son of Saul.

The Hungarian film directed by Laszlo Nemes, set in Auschwitz, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards, held in February 2016.

Spotlight won Best Picture that year, and The Revenant won Best Director (Alejandro G. Inarritu) and Best Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), but both are English-language films. The Woman Who Left is a Filipino film by Lav Diaz that won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2016, not an Oscar.

Answer: A

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

• Lav Diaz: The Woman Who Left, Golden Lion at Venice 2016.
• George Miller: Mad Max: Fury Road.
• Alejandro G. Inarritu: The Revenant, which won him the 2016 Oscar for Best Director.
• Nahid Hassanzadeh: Another Time, an Iranian film.

The other codes give The Revenant to Lav Diaz or Mad Max to Inarritu, which mixes up two of the best-known films of the year.

Answer: C

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

• Peace: Juan Manuel Santos, President of Colombia, for the peace process with the FARC.
• Medicine: Yoshinori Ohsumi, for discoveries about autophagy.
• Physics: David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz, for topological phases of matter.
• Chemistry: Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa, for molecular machines.

The code a-3, b-4, c-2, d-1 swaps the medicine and physics prizes, and the codes beginning with a-1 or a-4 give the Peace Prize to scientists.

Answer: C

The key gives Coimbatore.

Kiran Bhat shared the 2017 Scientific and Technical Academy Award with Michael Koperwas, Brian Cantwell and Paige Warner for the facial performance-capture solving system developed at Industrial Light and Magic. Indian press reports of the award (Deccan Chronicle, The News Minute, The Quint) describe him as a Coimbatore engineer, and the question asks for the place in India he belongs to.

Pilani is where he studied, at BITS Pilani, which makes it the nearest distractor. Ahmedabad and Hyderabad have no link to him. One profile says he was born in Thiruvananthapuram and that his family later moved to Coimbatore, so 'belongs to' rests on the Coimbatore connection that the reports and the key use.