Awards and Honours Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Maria Corina Machado.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee honoured the Venezuelan opposition leader for her work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and her struggle for a peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.

Malala Yousafzai received the prize in 2014. Antonio Guterres and Volodymyr Zelenskyy have not been awarded it.

Answer: A

The artist is Nalini Malini (Nalini Malani, as her name is usually spelt).

In 2019 Nalini Malani became the first Indian to receive the Joan Miro Prize, awarded by the Joan Miro Foundation in Barcelona. She is known for her video installations, shadow plays and paintings dealing with violence, gender and history.

M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza and Arpita Singh are major Indian painters, but none of them received this prize.

Answer: A

The award was the Order of Zayed.

The Order of Zayed, named after Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, founder of the UAE, is the country's highest civilian honour. It was announced for Prime Minister Modi in April 2019 and presented to him in Abu Dhabi in August 2019.

The Amir Amanullah Khan award is Afghanistan's highest civilian honour, which Modi received in 2016, and the other two are not the UAE's award.

Answer: B

The winner was Navneeth Murali.

Navneeth Murali, an Indian-American student from New Jersey, won the 2019 South Asian Spelling Bee, a competition for children of South Asian descent in the United States.

The other names in the options are not the 2019 winner.

The South Asian Spelling Bee is a national competition in the United States for children of South Asian origin, separate from the better-known Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Answer: D

The 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Award went to Ravish Kumar.

Ravish Kumar, the Hindi television journalist of NDTV India, received the 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Award for harnessing journalism to give a voice to the voiceless. He was one of the winners that year.

Rajdeep Sardesai, Rajat Sharma and Vinod Dua are also well-known journalists, but none of them received the 2019 award.

The award, named after the Philippine president Ramon Magsaysay, is often described as Asia's Nobel Prize.

Answer: C

The Future Policy Gold Award won by Sikkim honours the world's best laws and policies promoting agroecology.

The Future Policy Award is given by the World Future Council, with partners including the FAO and IFOAM-Organics International. In 2018 the theme was agroecology, and Sikkim won the gold award for becoming the world's first fully organic state, having converted all its farmland to organic farming.

The award has nothing to do with eco-tourism, cyber security or artificial intelligence; each year it picks one policy field, and in Sikkim's year that field was sustainable farming.

Answer: B

The 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to Richard Powers.

He won it for The Overstory, a novel about trees and the people bound to them.

Rebecca Makkai (The Great Believers) and Tommy Orange (There There) were the two other finalists in fiction that year, which makes them strong distractors. Clare Barron was a finalist in the drama category, for Dance Nation, not in fiction.

Answer: C

The prize went jointly to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert.

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Francois Englert of Belgium and Peter Higgs of Britain for the theoretical discovery of the mechanism that gives elementary particles their mass, confirmed when CERN's Large Hadron Collider found the Higgs boson in 2012.

Robert Brout, Englert's collaborator, died in 2011, and the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously. Carl Hagen published a similar idea in 1964 with Guralnik and Kibble but was not among the laureates.

Answer: B

The scientist is CNR Rao.

In November 2013 the Government announced the Bharat Ratna for the chemist Professor C.N.R. Rao, known for his work in solid state and materials chemistry, together with Sachin Tendulkar. Rao became the third scientist to receive it, after C.V. Raman and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

S. Radhakrishnan received the Bharat Ratna in 1954 and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam in 1997, so neither was 'recently chosen' in 2013. 'CPR Rao' is a distortion of the correct name.

Answer: A

The 2013 prize was to be awarded to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, printed in the paper as 'Angela Markel'.

The Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development for 2013 was announced for Angela Merkel in recognition of her leadership in Europe and her contribution to development. It is awarded each year by the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust.

Barack Obama, David Cameron and Sheikh Hasina were not the 2013 recipients.