Awards and Honours Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences went to Claudia Goldin.

Goldin, an economic historian at Harvard, was awarded the prize for advancing our understanding of women's labour market outcomes. Using two centuries of data, she showed how women's participation in paid work has changed and why gender gaps in earnings persist.

The other three were Nobel laureates of 2023 in other fields: Anne L'Huillier in physics (attosecond pulses of light), Katalin Kariko in physiology or medicine (mRNA vaccines), and Aleksey Yekimov in chemistry (quantum dots).

Answer: C

Ek Tha Gaon was directed by Srishti Lakhera.

The documentary, in Garhwali and Hindi, follows the last few residents of a village in Uttarakhand that has been emptied by migration to the cities. It won the award for the best non-feature film at the 69th National Film Awards, which honoured films of 2021.

The other names are not the director of this film; the paper's 'National Film Festival' refers to the National Film Awards.

Answer: D

The Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award for 2022 went to Sharath Kamal.

Achanta Sharath Kamal, India's veteran table tennis player, was the sole recipient of the country's highest sporting honour for 2022, after winning four medals, including three golds, at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.

Virat Kohli received the award (then the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna) in 2018, and Neeraj Chopra and Sunil Chhetri in 2021, so none of them was the 2022 recipient.

Answer: D

Lahari Bai belongs to the Baiga tribe.

Lahari Bai, from Dindori district of Madhya Pradesh, is known for preserving the seeds of many traditional millet varieties in a seed bank in her home. She was named brand ambassador for millets during the International Year of Millets, 2023. The Baiga are a particularly vulnerable tribal group living mainly in Dindori, Mandla and Balaghat.

The Sahariya, Bhil and Bharia are other tribes of Madhya Pradesh, but Lahari Bai is not from any of them.

Answer: B

Bhutan's highest civilian honour is the Order of the Druk Gyalpo.

The Order of the Druk Gyalpo (Dragon King) is Bhutan's highest decoration. Prime Minister Narendra Modi received it in March 2024, the first foreign head of government to be so honoured.

The other names in the options are not the title of Bhutan's highest civilian award; 'Druk Gyalpo', the title of Bhutan's king, is the key word to remember.

Answer: C

The award is the National Devi Ahilya Award (C).

The Madhya Pradesh Department of Culture created the National Devi Ahilya Award in 1996 to honour women artists in the field of tribal, folk and traditional arts. It is named after Devi Ahilyabai Holkar of Indore, and past recipients include Shanti Bai Maravi, a tribal artist of Mandla.

The Kabir, Shikhar and Tulsi awards named in the other options are separate honours and are not the one reserved for women artists of tribal, folk and traditional arts.

Answer: C

The 2023 International Prize in Statistics went to Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao.

C.R. Rao received the prize, often compared to a Nobel prize for statistics, for his 1945 paper that introduced the Cramer-Rao bound, the Rao-Blackwell theorem and ideas of information geometry. He died in 2023 at the age of 102.

The prize began in 2017: David Cox won it first, Bradley Efron in 2019 and Nan Laird in 2021.

Answer: C

The 2023 Padma Vibhushan in Science and Engineering went to Shri Srinivasa Varadhan.

S.R. Srinivasa Varadhan is an Indian-American mathematician at the Courant Institute in New York, known for his work on probability theory and large deviations, for which he won the Abel Prize in 2007.

The other 2023 Padma Vibhushan recipients named here were honoured in other fields: S.M. Krishna for public affairs and Dilip Mahalanabis, a pioneer of oral rehydration therapy, posthumously for medicine. Narinder Singh Kapany, the fibre-optics pioneer, received the Padma Vibhushan posthumously in 2021, not 2023.

Answer: D

The award was conferred upon the Governor of the central bank of India.

In March 2023 the London-based journal Central Banking named Shaktikanta Das, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, its Governor of the Year. The citation pointed to the RBI's handling of the pandemic, inflation and stress in the financial system.

The heads of the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of Canada and Bank Indonesia were not the recipients of this award for 2023.

Answer: D

The book is Sun Gunvanta Sun Budhivanta : Itihaasnama Punjab.

The Sahitya Akademi's awards for 2024 named the Punjabi poet Paul Kaur for this book of poetry, which reads the history of Punjab through a poet's voice.

The other three titles are not her award-winning book, so they do not answer the question.