Miscellaneous

• Option (b) is correct. The Golan Heights is a basalt plateau in the Levant, captured by Israel from Syria in the Six Day War of 1967 and effectively annexed by Israeli law in 1981, an act not recognised internationally. It lies at the junction of Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, commands the Sea of Galilee and its headwaters, and is patrolled by the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, whose position became precarious during the Syrian civil war when armed groups overran parts of the area of separation and detained peacekeepers in 2013 and 2014.
• Options (a), (c) and (d) name regions in which no such place exists. The elimination route is that the name recurs in reporting on Israel and Syria, and even a candidate who cannot place the plateau will associate it with that conflict.

• Option (c) is correct. The Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development for 2014 was awarded to the Indian Space Research Organisation, the jury citing the Mars Orbiter Mission, which entered Martian orbit on 24 September 2014 at the first attempt and at a cost far below comparable missions, and ISRO's record of applying space technology to development ends in communications, remote sensing, weather forecasting and disaster warning. The prize is given annually by the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust, and its earlier recipients include institutions as well as individuals.
• Options (a), (b) and (d) are all national scientific institutions of standing but none was the recipient. There is no elimination route beyond recall, and the year is the operative detail, which is what lifts the item above easy for a candidate who remembers the award but not its year.

Rajasthan explored the feasibility of an artificial inland port, the concept being to connect a landlocked location to the Arabian Sea by a long navigational channel cut across the low-lying saline tract of the Rann of Kachchh, the attraction being direct maritime access for a State whose trade otherwise moves overland to the Gujarat ports. Hence (d). The distractor structure is worth noting.

• Options (a) and (c), Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, are coastal States and therefore have no need whatever of an artificial inland port connected by a channel, which should exclude them on the logic of the question rather than on recall.
• Option (b), Chhattisgarh, is genuinely landlocked and is the only serious competitor, but it lies far inland across the Deccan interior with no plausible channel alignment, whereas Rajasthan abuts the Rann and the Gulf of Kachchh, which is what made the proposal conceivable at all. The item is difficult because the proposal was reported only briefly and never advanced, but the partial elimination route through coastal geography raises it above pure recall.

The Man Who Knew Infinity takes its title from Robert Kanigel's 1991 biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan, and follows Ramanujan from his clerkship at the Madras Port Trust through his correspondence with G. H. Hardy and his years at Trinity College, Cambridge. Hence (a).

• Option (b), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, was the astrophysicist who established the limiting mass of a white dwarf and shared the Nobel Prize in 1983; his conflict with Eddington is a well-known episode but not the subject of this film.
• Option (c), Satyendra Nath Bose, gave the statistics that bears his name and, with Einstein, the Bose-Einstein condensate.
• Option (d), C. V. Raman, won the Nobel Prize in 1930 for the scattering effect named after him. The title itself supplies a strong route without any knowledge of the film: infinity is a mathematician's preoccupation rather than a physicist's, and the three distractors are all physicists while only Ramanujan is a mathematician, which resolves the item on a single distinction.

• Statement 1 is correct: Tiger Woods won the inaugural Laureus World Sportsman of the Year award in 2000, following his extraordinary 1999 and 2000 seasons.
• Statement 3 is correct: Roger Federer has won the Sportsman of the Year award more times than any other individual, taking it five times between 2005 and 2018.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and is the decisive statement: the award has gone across a wide range of disciplines, tennis, athletics, football, golf and cycling among them, and Formula One drivers form only a small minority of recipients, so the claim that it has mostly gone to them fails. Hence 1 and 3, giving (c). A candidate who knows only that Federer is the most decorated recipient can eliminate (a), and knowing that the award is not dominated by any single sport removes (b) and (d).

• Statement 1 is incorrect: the official motto of the Tokyo Games was United by Emotion, chosen to express the power of sport to bring people together after the pandemic postponement. The phrase A New World was the motto of the Rio 2016 Games in its Portuguese form.
• Statement 2 is correct: the 32nd Summer Olympics introduced sport climbing, surfing and skateboarding as new disciplines and brought back karate, baseball and softball, several of them selected under the host country provision permitting additional sports. Hence (b). The Games were formally the Games of the XXXII Olympiad, retaining the Tokyo 2020 branding despite being held in 2021, a detail that has itself been examinable.

Both statements are incorrect, which turns on a single point about the competition format. Qualification for the final was determined not by the raw number of matches won but by the percentage of available points earned, a method adopted precisely because the pandemic caused teams to play unequal numbers of series, making absolute point totals unfair.

• Statement 1 therefore fails.
• Statement 2 fails for the same reason and also on the facts, since New Zealand finished above England on points percentage rather than on matches won. India and New Zealand contested the final at Southampton in June 2021, New Zealand winning by eight wickets. Hence (d). The transferable lesson is that when a competition is disrupted, normalised or percentage based ranking is the usual remedy, and questions of this type reward knowing the mechanism rather than the scoreline.

• Pair 1 is correct. The Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award, the highest sporting honour, recognises the most spectacular and outstanding performance over the preceding four years.
• Pair 2 is incorrect. The Arjuna Award recognises consistently outstanding performance over four years together with qualities of leadership, sportsmanship and discipline, not lifetime achievement. Lifetime achievement is recognised by the Dhyan Chand Award.
• Pair 3 is correct, the Dronacharya Award honouring coaches who have produced outstanding sportspersons or teams.
• Pair 4 is incorrect and is the second discriminator. The Rashtriya Khel Protsahan Puraskar is given to corporate entities, public sector undertakings, sports control boards and other institutions for promoting sport, not to individual retired sportspersons, whose post retirement contribution again falls under the Dhyan Chand Award. Two pairs match, giving (b).

• Statement 1 is correct. The 44th Chess Olympiad, held at Mahabalipuram near Chennai in 2022, was the first time India hosted the event, having taken it over at short notice.
• Statement 2 is correct, the mascot being Thambi, a knight figure whose name means younger brother in Tamil.
• Statements 3 and 4 are both incorrect because the two trophies are interchanged. The Hamilton Russell Cup is awarded to the winner of the open section, having been donated in 1927, while the Vera Menchik Cup, named after the first women's world champion, goes to the winner of the women's section. Two statements stand, giving (b).
• Option (d) requires both trophy attributions to pass, and the swapped pair is the entire design of the question.

Both books are by Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the External Affairs Minister. The India Way, subtitled Strategies for an Uncertain World, appeared in 2020, and Why Bharat Matters followed in January 2024, shortly before the examination.

• Option (a) is wrong because Bhupender Yadav, then Environment Minister, co authored The Rise of the BJP with Ila Patnaik.
• Option (b) is wrong because Nalin Mehta wrote The New BJP and India on Television, works of political and media analysis rather than foreign policy memoir.
• Option (c) is wrong because Shashi Tharoor, though a prolific author on India's international position with titles such as Pax Indica and An Era of Darkness, wrote neither of these. The pairing of an older and a very recent title by the same author is the standard construction for this kind of question.

The Gandhi Peace Prize was instituted in 1995 to mark the one hundred and twenty fifth birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, and is conferred annually by the Government of India through the Ministry of Culture for contributions towards social, economic and political transformation through non-violence. The selection jury is chaired by the Prime Minister and includes the Chief Justice of India and the Leader of the single largest opposition party in the Lok Sabha, along with an eminent person nominated to the jury. The President of India is not a member, which is the discriminating fact, and the underlying logic is that the President confers honours rather than selecting recipients, a separation maintained across national awards so that the head of State is not placed in the position of choosing those he or she will honour. The answer is therefore (c).

• Options (b) and (d) both include the President and fail on that ground.
• Option (a) omits the Chief Justice of India, whose presence on the jury follows the standard pattern for high national selection committees, which draw on the heads of the executive, the judiciary and the parliamentary opposition to lend the choice cross-institutional legitimacy.

• Statement I is correct: the inaugural Kho Kho World Cup was held in New Delhi in January 2025, at the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium, with teams from several countries competing in men's and women's categories, and India won both titles by defeating Nepal in each final.
• Statements II and III are incorrect, and the error is a deliberate transposition rather than an invention: the two winning margins given are genuine, but they have been exchanged between the categories. The men's final was won by the narrower of the two margins and the women's by the wider, so attaching the larger score to the men's result and the smaller to the women's reverses the actual outcomes. Since the country, the opponent and the result are all correctly stated in both, the statements can only be rejected by recalling which score belonged to which final, which makes this an unusually unforgiving item. Only I holds, giving (a).
• Option (d) accepts both transposed scores, and options (b) and (c) each accept one. A candidate who knew that India won both titles but not the exact scorelines had no reliable route to the answer, and would most likely have marked (d).

• Statement I is incorrect and conflates two distinct events of 2024. The forty fifth Chess Olympiad was held at Budapest in September 2024 and is a team competition, in which India won gold in both the open and the women's sections, with Gukesh taking an individual board medal. It has no final in which one player defeats another. Gukesh became the youngest undisputed World Chess Champion at the World Chess Championship held at Singapore in December 2024, and his opponent there was Ding Liren of China, not Ian Nepomniachtchi. The statement therefore misnames the event and the opponent, either of which alone defeats it. Nepomniachtchi is a plausible distractor because he contested the two preceding championship matches against Magnus Carlsen and Ding Liren.
• Statement II is correct: Abhimanyu Mishra of the United States earned the Grandmaster title in 2021 at the age of twelve years and four months, breaking the record previously held by Sergey Karjakin, and it stands as the youngest ever. Only II holds, giving (b).
• Options (a) and (c) accept the conflated account, and option (d) discards the accurate record.

The provisional official key gives (a), 1 and 2 only. On analysis the correct answer is (c), 1 only, because statement 2 and statement 3 both fail.

• Statement 1 is correct. The four majors are jointly governed through the Grand Slam Board, which administers the Grand Slam Rule Book, the Grand Slam Development Fund and common disciplinary and anti-corruption arrangements, so a shared governance structure does establish the partnership among them.
• Statement 2 is incorrect, and this is where the official key errs. A Grand Slam is not open for entry to all internationally ranked players. The singles field is fixed, and a place in it is obtained only by direct acceptance within the ranking cut-off for the entry list, by coming through the qualifying event, or by a wild card. A ranked player outside those routes has no entitlement to enter. The age limb of the statement is wrong as well, since the International Tennis Federation age eligibility rule does not set a simple threshold above which a player is free to compete. It imposes a graduated restriction on the number of professional events a player under eighteen may enter, tightening as age falls, so a player just above fourteen is among the most restricted rather than among the eligible.
• Statement 3 is also incorrect, and the defect is a shift in the subject of the limitation. The Grand Slam Rule Book limits the number of wild cards a tournament may award, eight in the singles main draw, and a further allocation in qualifying. It does not limit the number of wild cards an individual player may receive, and nothing prevents one player from accepting a wild card at all four majors in the same season. The limit attaches to the tournament's allocation, not to the player's receipt, so the statement as phrased has no basis. Only statement 1 survives, which gives (c).
• Option (a) fails because it accepts statement 2, option (b) fails because it discards the sound governance statement while accepting both defective ones, and option (d) accepts all three.