Famous Personalities Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Jaipur was designed by Vidyadhar Bhattacharya.

Vidyadhar Bhattacharya, a Bengali scholar and architect in the service of Sawai Jai Singh II, planned Jaipur in 1727. He laid it out on a grid of rectangular blocks, following the principles of the Shilpa Shastra and Vastu Shastra, with wide straight streets, which made it one of the earliest planned cities of India; its walled city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Frank Gehry, B.V. Doshi and Zaha Hadid are modern architects of the 20th and 21st centuries, centuries too late to have designed an 18th-century city.

Answer: A

The first curator was Gaurishankar Hirachand Ojha.

The Rajputana Museum in Ajmer, housed in Akbar's palace, opened in 1908, and the historian Gaurishankar Hirachand Ojha was appointed its first curator. He was a leading historian and epigraphist of Rajasthan, known for his histories of its princely states and for Bharatiya Prachin Lipimala on ancient Indian scripts.

Kaviraj Shyamaldas wrote Vir Vinod, the history of Mewar, Bavji Chatur Singh was a Mewari saint-poet, and Komal Kothari was a folklorist who founded Rupayan Sansthan; none of them was the museum's first curator.

Answer: B

Swami Vivekananda was born in 1863.

He was born Narendranath Datta in Calcutta on 12 January 1863. His birthday is celebrated in India as National Youth Day.

The other years are nearby events that are easily mixed up: 1861 is the year of Rabindranath Tagore's birth, 1869 is the year of Mahatma Gandhi's birth, and 1888 is the year Vivekananda began his years of wandering across India as a monk, not the year he was born.

Answer: D

Dr. Kamla Beniwal served as Governor of Tripura and Mizoram.

Kamla Beniwal, a Congress leader from Rajasthan, was appointed Governor of Tripura in 2009 and moved the same year to Gujarat, where she served until 2014. She was then transferred to Mizoram in July 2014 and removed from office the following month.

Each other option pairs Tripura with a north-eastern state she never governed: Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh or Sikkim.

Answer: B

The 'Father of Indian Sociology' is G. S. Ghurye.

Govind Sadashiv Ghurye headed the Department of Sociology at the University of Bombay from 1924, built the first major postgraduate school of sociology in India, founded the Indian Sociological Society, and wrote pioneering works such as Caste and Race in India. He trained many of the next generation of Indian sociologists.

M. N. Srinivas, one of those students, is known for the concepts of Sanskritisation and the dominant caste. Radhakamal Mukerjee and D. P. Mukerji founded the Lucknow school, but neither carries the 'father' title.

Answer: B

The first man to land on the Moon was Neil Armstrong.

Armstrong, commander of Apollo 11, stepped onto the Moon on 21 July 1969 (20 July in the USA).

Buzz Aldrin followed him as the second man on the Moon, and Michael Collins stayed in orbit in the command module. Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space, in 1961, but never went to the Moon.

Gagarin's orbit of the Earth on 12 April 1961 came eight years before the Moon landing.

Answer: C

Gandhi was born at Porbandar.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 at Porbandar, a coastal town in Kathiawar (now in Gujarat), where his father was the diwan.

Ahmedabad was where he later set up the Sabarmati Ashram, and Bhuj is in Kutch, with no link to his birth. Since Porbandar is listed, 'None of these' is wrong.

The house where he was born, now called Kirti Mandir, is preserved as a memorial.

Answer: D

The 'Iron Man of India' is Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

Patel earned the name for the firmness with which he, as the first Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, brought more than 560 princely states into the Indian Union after 1947.

Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose and Dr. Rajendra Prasad have other titles: Bose is 'Netaji', and Prasad, the first President, was called 'Deshratna'.

Answer: A

Greta Thunberg is from Sweden.

In August 2018, at 15, she began a school strike for the climate outside the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm, which grew into the worldwide Fridays for Future movement. She addressed the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019 and was named Time's Person of the Year.

She is not from Finland, Germany or Australia, though the school climate strikes spread to all of them.

Her campaign drew attention for her blunt speeches to world leaders and for travelling by sailing boat rather than by air to cut carbon emissions.

Answer: B

Mahatma Gandhi was born in 1869.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 at Porbandar in present-day Gujarat. The date is observed as Gandhi Jayanti in India and as the International Day of Non-Violence. He was the son of Karamchand Gandhi, the diwan of Porbandar, and Putlibai.

1859, 1863 and 1879 are the usual traps: 1863 is Swami Vivekananda's birth year, and 1879 is ten years too late.