Awards, Honours and Personalities in News

• 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.

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).

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.