Awards and Honours Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The 2023 Urdu award went to Sadiqua Nawab Saher.

Sahitya Akademi announced its awards for 2023 in December 2023; the Urdu award was given to the novelist Sadiqa Nawab Saher (printed in the paper as Sadiqua).

The other names are not the 2023 Urdu winner.

Sahitya Akademi gives its award each year to one book in each of the 24 languages it recognises, so there is a single Urdu winner for 2023.

Answer: C

The film was Ek Tha Gaon.

At the 69th National Film Awards for 2021, announced in August 2023, the Swarna Kamal for the best non-feature film went to Ek Tha Gaon (Once Upon a Village), Srishti Lakhera's documentary about a nearly deserted village in Uttarakhand.

'Ek Tha Qasba', 'Ek Tha Shahar' and 'Ek Tha Tola' are made-up variations on the title.

The Swarna Kamal (Golden Lotus) is the top category of award at the National Film Awards, given for the best films and directors, while Rajat Kamal (Silver Lotus) awards go to most other categories.

Answer: D

The posthumous award went to Havildar Abdul Majid.

Havildar Abdul Majid of the Parachute Regiment (Special Forces) was killed in a counter-terrorist operation in the Rajouri district of Jammu and Kashmir in November 2023. He was awarded the Kirti Chakra posthumously in the gallantry awards announced on the eve of Republic Day 2024.

Major Digvijay Singh Rawat, Major Deependra Vikram Basnet and Havildar Pawan Kumar Yadav also received the Kirti Chakra in that list, but their awards were not posthumous.

Answer: D

The award went to Rajasekaran (Devi Bharathi).

The Sahitya Akademi Award 2023 for Tamil was given to Rajasekaran, who writes as Devi Bharathi, for his novel Neervazhi Padooum.

The other names are Tamil writers who did not receive the 2023 Tamil award. The convention of giving a writer's pen name in brackets, as in 'Devi Bharathi' and 'Maalan', is how the Akademi lists them.

Answer: A

The award went to Music By Laxmikant Pyarelal : The incredibly Melodious Journey.

The book by Rajiv Vijayakar, a study of the composer duo Laxmikant-Pyarelal and their decades of Hindi film music, won the Swarna Kamal for the Best Book on Cinema at the 69th National Film Awards for 2021, announced in August 2023.

The other three are real books on Indian cinema, but they did not win the award that year.

Answer: A

The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology of 2021, given by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, went to Dr Binoy Kumar Saikia of the CSIR North East Institute of Science and Technology at Jorhat in the field of Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean and Planetary Sciences, according to the CSIR list of the 2021 winners. The other names in the options are scientists who are not the winners of this category in that year, so they are not correct. The answer is Dr Binoy Kumar Saikia, option A.

Answer: D

The National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) received the UNESCO King Sejong Literacy Prize in 2021. The prize recognised its programme on technology-enabled inclusive learning material for persons with disabilities, with a focus on Indian Sign Language content: Indian Sign Language was added as a secondary-level subject and sign-language videos were produced for several subjects.

NCERT, IGNOU and AICTE did not receive the 2021 prize. NIOS is the national open school board under the Ministry of Education, which is why the award fits an inclusive open-learning programme and not a curriculum body or a technical education regulator.

Answer: A

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Harvey Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles Rice for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus. Their work identified the virus behind most cases of blood-borne hepatitis that were not hepatitis A or B, making blood tests and antiviral drugs possible. Hepatitis A and B viruses had already been identified earlier, and Hepatitis D was not the subject of the 2020 award. The three scientists showed that a virus, not hepatitis A or B, was behind many cases of chronic hepatitis acquired through blood transfusion, and the discovery made it possible to test donated blood and to develop antiviral treatment.

Answer: B

The Padma awards announced on the eve of Republic Day in January 2021 included 7 Padma Vibhushan awards, 10 Padma Bhushan awards and 102 Padma Shri awards, 119 in all. So 10 persons were conferred the Padma Bhushan, option (B). The numbers 7, 12 and 18 do not match the count of the Padma Bhushan awards of that year; 7 is the number of Padma Vibhushan awards, and the total of 119 includes all the three kinds.

Answer: A

The recipient was Prof. S Balasubramanian.

Shankar Balasubramanian and David Klenerman shared the 2020 Millennium Technology Prize for developing next-generation DNA sequencing, a technique that made sequencing fast and cheap.

Jennifer Doudna is known for CRISPR gene editing, Harvey Alter for work on hepatitis C, and C N R Rao for work in solid-state and materials chemistry, so they were not the recipients.

Balasubramanian, a professor at the University of Cambridge, shared the prize with David Klenerman for the technique called Solexa or next-generation sequencing, which reads millions of fragments of DNA at once. The cost of reading a human genome fell sharply as a result, and the method is used in medicine and research.