Awards & Honours Quiz: Nobel Prizes

The correct answer is A, Alfred Nobel. The Swedish chemist who invented dynamite signed his last will in 1895 and left most of his fortune to endow prizes for those who had conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. He died on 10 December 1896 and the first prizes were awarded in 1901.

Option B, Andrew Carnegie, endowed libraries and a peace foundation but no prize of this name. Option C, Joseph Pulitzer, left money for the Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, letters and music, awarded in the United States, and his name is the one most often substituted here. Option D, Cecil Rhodes, endowed the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford, not a prize. Keep the founder with the two dates that always follow him in a paper: the will of 1895 and the first awards in 1901.

The correct answer is C, 1901. Alfred Nobel's estate had to be settled and the Nobel Foundation established before any prize could be given, so the first awards came five years after his death. The first Peace Prize went jointly to Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, and Frederic Passy.

Option A, 1895, is the year Nobel signed his will, and the date candidates confuse most often with the first award. Option B, 1896, is the year of his death, on 10 December, which is why the ceremony is held on that date every year. Option D, 1913, is the year Rabindranath Tagore won the Literature Prize, an Indian landmark rather than a founding date. Hold the sequence in one line: will 1895, death 1896, first prizes 1901.

The correct answer is B, the central bank of Sweden. Sveriges Riksbank founded the prize in 1968 to mark its three hundredth anniversary, and it was awarded for the first time in 1969. Its formal name is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences selects the laureates.

Option A, the Nobel Foundation, administers the funds left by Nobel and organises the ceremony, but it did not create this prize. Option C, the Swedish Academy, is the body that chooses the Literature laureate. Option D, the Norwegian parliament, appoints the committee that awards the Peace Prize. The point examiners test is that Economics is not one of the five prizes named in Nobel's will, which is why it is described as being in memory of him.

The correct answer is B, Oslo. Alfred Nobel's will directed that the Peace Prize be decided by a committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament, while the other prizes were left to Swedish institutions, and the Peace Prize is therefore announced and presented in the Norwegian capital.

Option A, Stockholm, is where every other prize is presented, including Economic Sciences, so it is the answer for five of the six categories and the natural wrong choice here. Option C, Geneva, is the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross and of many United Nations bodies, which makes it sound plausible in a question about peace. Option D, Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, has no connection with the prize at all. Remember the split in one sentence: Peace in Oslo, everything else in Stockholm.

The correct answer is B, Rabindranath Tagore, who received the Prize in Literature in 1913 for Gitanjali, becoming the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in any category. He also wrote the national anthems sung in India and in Bangladesh.

Option A, C. V. Raman, won the Physics Prize in 1930 for the scattering of light named after him, which makes him the first Asian to win in a science but not the first Asian laureate overall; this is the distinction the question is built on. Option C, Mother Teresa, received the Peace Prize in 1979 for her work in Kolkata. Option D, Har Gobind Khorana, shared the Medicine Prize in 1968, by which time he was a citizen of the United States. Keep the two firsts apart: Tagore 1913 for any prize, Raman 1930 for a science.

The correct answer is B, Physics. Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman received the Prize in 1930 for his work on the scattering of light, in which a part of the scattered light changes wavelength, an effect that carries his name and gave chemists a powerful method of studying molecules.

Option A, Chemistry, is the category in which Venkatraman Ramakrishnan won in 2009 for work on the structure of the ribosome, and the similarity of the names makes this the most common error in the question. Option C, Medicine, was Har Gobind Khorana's category in 1968. Option D, Economic Sciences, was Amartya Sen's in 1998 and Abhijit Banerjee's in 2019. Fix each Indian laureate with a category and a year, because the paper asks for the pairing far more often than for the achievement.

The correct answer is B, Amartya Sen, honoured in 1998 for his contributions to welfare economics, including work on social choice and on the causes of famine, which showed that famines occur even when food is available if people lack the means to obtain it.

Option A, Abhijit Banerjee, shared the prize in 2019 with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for an experimental approach to alleviating global poverty; he is of Indian origin and holds citizenship abroad, and the two Indian names in economics are regularly swapped in options. Option C, Manmohan Singh, was an economist and Prime Minister but never a Nobel laureate. Option D, Raghuram Rajan, served as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and has not received the prize. Attach the years firmly: Sen in 1998, Banerjee in 2019.

The correct answer is B, the death anniversary of Alfred Nobel, who died on 10 December 1896. The ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo are held on that date every year, and the prizes themselves are announced in October, some weeks earlier.

Option A is wrong because Nobel was born in October 1833, and no ceremony is tied to his birthday. Option C refers to the establishment of the Nobel Foundation in 1900, which made the first awards possible the following year but is not the date of the ceremony. Option D confuses the announcement, made each October by the awarding bodies, with the presentation in December. Note the coincidence worth remembering: 10 December is also Human Rights Day, adopted in 1948, so one date can serve two different questions.

The correct answer is B, Marie Curie. She shared the Physics Prize in 1903 for work on radioactivity, becoming the first woman laureate, and won the Chemistry Prize alone in 1911 for the discovery of radium and polonium. No one else has won in two separate scientific categories.

Option A, Linus Pauling, won twice as well, in Chemistry in 1954 and Peace in 1962, but Peace is not a science, so his distinction is different: he is the only person with two unshared prizes. Option C, Albert Einstein, won a single Physics Prize, awarded for the photoelectric effect rather than for relativity. Option D, Frederick Sanger, won the Chemistry Prize twice, in 1958 and 1980, which is two prizes in the same science. Read such questions carefully, because each of these names is a record of its own kind.

The correct answer is A, Malala Yousafzai, who was seventeen when she shared the Peace Prize in 2014 for her campaign for the right of girls to go to school. That makes her the youngest laureate in any category in the history of the prize.

Option B, Kailash Satyarthi, shared the same Peace Prize with her for his work against the exploitation of children in India, so the pairing of the two names in one year is itself an examinable fact. Option C, Rudyard Kipling, born in Bombay, was forty-one when he won the Literature Prize in 1907 and remains the youngest winner in that category, not overall. Option D, Lawrence Bragg, was twenty-five when he shared the Physics Prize in 1915 with his father, which is the youngest in the sciences. Note which record each name holds before answering.

The correct answer is B, the Karolinska Institute, the medical university in Stockholm whose assembly selects the laureate in Physiology or Medicine, exactly as Alfred Nobel's will laid down.

Option A, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, decides Physics, Chemistry and the prize in Economic Sciences, and because it handles three of the six categories it is the answer candidates give by habit. Option C, the Swedish Academy, is a different body altogether, the one that chooses the Literature laureate, and its similar name is the sharpest trap in this chapter. Option D, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, is appointed by the parliament of Norway and awards the Peace Prize in Oslo. Learn the four awarding bodies as a table, because a question may name any one of them.

The correct answer is B, three. The statutes of the Nobel Foundation allow a prize in one category to be divided among no more than three persons in a single year, and the money is shared between them. The rule is often discussed in the sciences, where large teams work on one discovery.

Option A, two, is the number of shares in many well known awards but not the limit here. Option C, four, is beyond what the statutes permit for individuals. Option D is wrong because a limit certainly exists, although the Peace Prize may be given to an organisation instead of a person, and the International Committee of the Red Cross has received it three times. Learn the neighbouring rule with it: since 1974 a prize may not be awarded posthumously, though a laureate who dies after the announcement still receives it.