Sports and Major Events

• 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.

• 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.