Sports GK Mixed Quiz: Set 27

The correct answer is A, Chamonix in France. The first Winter Olympic Games were held at Chamonix in the French Alps in 1924, the same year as the Paris Summer Olympics, and were recognised retrospectively by the International Olympic Committee as the first Winter Games. Option B is wrong because St Moritz in Switzerland hosted the second Winter Games in 1928 and hosted them again in 1948. Option C is wrong because Lake Placid in the United States hosted the third Winter Games in 1932 and hosted them again in 1980. Option D is wrong because Oslo in Norway hosted the Winter Games of 1952; Norway is instead remembered as the country that leads the all-time Winter Olympic medal table. Until 1992 the Winter and Summer Games fell in the same year, and the cycle was shifted by two years so that Lillehammer followed Albertville after only two seasons.

The correct answer is C, 2018. Khelo India was launched in 2018 by merging earlier grassroots sports programmes into a single national scheme, and its first competition, the Khelo India School Games, was held at New Delhi in January of that year. From the following year the event was renamed the Khelo India Youth Games. Option A, 2014, is the year the Target Olympic Podium Scheme was launched, which is the commonest confusion in this question since both are flagship sports schemes. Option B, 2016, matches no landmark in the scheme history. Option D, 2020, is the year the first Khelo India University Games and the first Khelo India Winter Games were held, but the parent scheme was already two years old by then. Keep 2014 for TOPS and 2018 for Khelo India.

The correct answer is B, James Naismith. Naismith, a physical education instructor in Springfield in the United States, devised basketball in 1891 as an indoor game for the winter months, using two peach baskets fixed above the floor; a team plays five players on court. Option A is wrong because William G. Morgan invented volleyball, in 1895, also in the United States, and the two names are deliberately offered together because the games and the years are neighbours. Option C is wrong because Walter Camp is remembered for shaping American football, not basketball. Option D is wrong because Pierre de Coubertin revived the Olympic Games, founding the International Olympic Committee in 1894 and seeing the first modern Games held at Athens in 1896; he invented no sport. The safe pair to memorise is Naismith with basketball and 1891, Morgan with volleyball and 1895.

The correct answer is B, Gujarat. The 36th National Games were held in Gujarat in 2022, spread across Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, Surat, Vadodara, Rajkot and Bhavnagar, with the mascot Savaj, an Asiatic lion cub chosen because the Asiatic lion survives in the wild only in that state. Option A, Goa, hosted the next edition, the 37th, in 2023, with the mascot Moga the gaur, so it is the closest wrong answer. Option C, Kerala, hosted the 35th edition in 2015, with Ammu the great hornbill as mascot, and had also hosted in 1987. Option D, Uttarakhand, hosted the 38th edition in 2025, with Mauli the Himalayan monal. The sequence worth memorising is Kerala for the 35th, Gujarat for the 36th, Goa for the 37th and Uttarakhand for the 38th, since questions on this topic almost always come from these four.

The correct answer is B, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. They reached the summit on 29 May 1953 as part of a British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt; Hillary was a New Zealander and Tenzing Norgay a Sherpa who later became the first director of field training at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling. Option A is wrong because Mallory and Irvine disappeared high on Everest in 1924 and it has never been established whether they reached the top. Option C is wrong because Messner and Habeler made the first ascent without supplementary oxygen, in 1978. Option D is wrong because Herzog and Lachenal made the first ascent of Annapurna I in 1950, the first eight-thousander ever climbed. Everest had been identified as the world's highest peak by Radhanath Sikdar of the Great Trigonometrical Survey, and was listed for years only as Peak XV before it was named.

The correct answer is A, Pakistan. At the Feroz Shah Kotla ground in Delhi in February 1999 Anil Kumble took ten wickets for 74 runs in Pakistan's second innings, becoming only the second bowler in the history of Test cricket to take all ten in an innings, after Jim Laker of England, who did it against Australia at Old Trafford in 1956. Option B, Australia, was the side against which Kumble took many of his other famous hauls, which is why it is the common distractor here. Option C, Sri Lanka, and option D, England, are unconnected with the feat. Two related facts are worth keeping: Kumble is the highest wicket-taker for India in Test cricket, and the only other bowler to take ten in an innings since 1999 is Ajaz Patel of New Zealand, who did it in Mumbai. A question may also ask for the ground, which was the Feroz Shah Kotla.

The correct answer is C, 1895. Morgan, working in Holyoke in the United States, designed volleyball as a gentler indoor game than the newly invented basketball, and a team plays six players on court. Option A is wrong because 1885 belongs to no landmark in this topic and is placed only to widen the spread of years. Option B is wrong because 1891 is the year James Naismith invented basketball, four years earlier and in the same part of the United States, which is precisely the confusion the question is built on. Option D is wrong because 1900 is the year the Davis Cup in tennis began, and also the year of the Paris Olympic Games, but it has nothing to do with volleyball. Remember the two inventions as a pair, basketball in 1891 and volleyball in 1895, and these questions become automatic.

The correct answer is B, Royal Calcutta Golf Club. Founded in 1829, it is the oldest golf club in India and the oldest anywhere outside Great Britain, and it was given the title Royal in 1911. Option A is wrong because the Delhi Golf Club, host of many editions of the Indian Open, dates from the middle of the twentieth century. Option C is wrong because the Bombay club, though also an old colonial institution, came after Calcutta. Option D is wrong because the Bangalore Golf Club was founded towards the end of the nineteenth century. The club's date is a favourite static GK question, often paired with the Indian Golf Union of 1955, which governs amateur golf, and the Professional Golf Tour of India of 2006, which runs the professional circuit in the country.

The correct answer is C, Bachendri Pal. She reached the summit of Everest on 23 May 1984 as a member of an Indian expedition and became the first Indian woman and the fifth woman in the world to do so. Option A is wrong because Santosh Yadav holds a different distinction: she became the first woman in the world to climb Everest twice, in 1992 and 1993, and also summited by the difficult Kangshung face. Option B is wrong because Arunima Sinha, who climbed in 2013, is remembered as the first female amputee in the world to reach the summit. Option D is wrong because Premlata Agarwal, who climbed in 2011, was the oldest Indian woman to do so at the time. A useful ordering is Junko Tabei in 1975 as the first woman in the world, Bachendri Pal in 1984 as the first Indian woman, and Santosh Yadav in 1992 and 1993 as the first woman to do it twice.

The correct answer is B, women's artistic gymnastics. The beam is a padded bar about five metres long and only ten centimetres wide, raised roughly a metre and a quarter above the floor, and it is one of the four women's apparatus along with the vault, the uneven bars and the floor exercise. A is wrong because the men's six apparatus are the floor, pommel horse, rings, vault, parallel bars and horizontal bar, and the beam appears in none of them. C is wrong because rhythmic gymnastics is performed on a floor area with hand apparatus, namely the rope, hoop, ball, clubs and ribbon, and uses no fixed equipment of this kind. D is wrong because trampoline gymnastics, added to the Olympic programme at Sydney in 2000, is contested on a trampoline bed alone. The pair to remember is beam and uneven bars for women, pommel horse and rings for men.

The correct answer is B, Bhutan, where archery is the official national sport and village tournaments with song and dance are part of festival life. Option A is wrong because Nepal declared volleyball its national sport in 2017; the traditional game earlier associated with it was dandi biyo. Option C is wrong because Mongolia is linked with the three manly sports of the Naadam festival, wrestling, horse racing and archery together, rather than with archery alone as a declared national sport. Option D is wrong because Myanmar is associated with chinlone, a cane ball game, and no archery declaration. In the Indian neighbourhood the list to hold is Bhutan with archery, Nepal and Sri Lanka with volleyball, Bangladesh with kabaddi and Pakistan with hockey, while India has declared no national game at all.

The correct answer is B, Arati Saha, who crossed the English Channel in 1959 and became the first Asian woman to do so; in 1960 she also became the first Indian sportswoman to be awarded the Padma Shri. Option A is wrong because Bula Choudhury, also a swimmer from Bengal, swam the Channel later and is known for crossing the seven seas, a separate achievement. Option C is wrong because Mihir Sen was a man, the first Indian to swim the English Channel, in 1958, and the distractor works only if the question is read carelessly. Option D is wrong because Nilima Ghose was an athlete, one of the first two Indian women to compete at the Olympic Games, at Helsinki in 1952, and not a swimmer. Remember the pair of years: Mihir Sen in 1958 and Arati Saha in 1959.

The correct answer is B, skeleton. In skeleton the athlete lies face down and head first on a small sled and steers it down an ice track by shifting body weight. Option A is wrong because in luge the athlete lies on the back and goes down feet first, which is the pairing most often reversed in examinations. Option C is wrong because bobsleigh uses a larger enclosed sled with a crew of two or four, a steering mechanism and brakes. Option D is wrong because curling has nothing to do with sleds at all: granite stones are slid along a sheet of ice towards a target called the house while team mates sweep the ice ahead of the stone, which is why it is called chess on ice.

The correct answer is C, seven: six field players and one goalkeeper, who is distinguished by a red cap while the two teams wear white and dark caps. Option A is wrong because five is the field strength in basketball, not water polo. Option B is wrong but is the standard trap, since six is the number of field players alone; the question asks for the whole side in the water, so the goalkeeper must be counted. Option D is wrong because eleven belongs to football, cricket and hockey, not to water polo. A match is played in four quarters of eight minutes of actual playing time, a team must shoot within a fixed possession period, and players use the eggbeater kick to stay upright with their hands free. Water polo was introduced for men at the Paris Olympics of 1900, making it the first team sport of the modern Games, and the women entered at Sydney in 2000.

The correct answer is B, Lacrosse and ice hockey. The National Sports of Canada Act of 1994 names lacrosse as the national summer sport and ice hockey as the national winter sport, which makes Canada one of the few countries whose national games rest on a statute rather than on custom. Option A is wrong because baseball is the popular national pastime of the United States, and although basketball was invented by a Canadian, James Naismith, it is not a declared national sport of Canada. Option C is wrong because it leaves out lacrosse; curling is popular in Canada but is not named in the Act. Option D is wrong for the same reason, and because it drops ice hockey, the winter sport the Act expressly names. The statute is worth remembering by name, because questions often ask for the year 1994.

The correct answer is B, Dola Banerjee. The archer from West Bengal won the women's recurve gold at the 2007 Archery World Cup Final in Dubai, the first World Cup Final title won by an Indian archer, and she was honoured with the Arjuna Award.

Option A is wrong, and is the favourite distractor, because Deepika Kumari came later; she reached the world number one ranking, won two gold medals at the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi and has many World Cup stage medals, but she was not the first at the World Cup Final. Option C is wrong because Bombayla Devi of Manipur is remembered as a steady Olympic team member rather than for a World Cup Final title. Option D is wrong because Jyothi Surekha Vennam shoots the compound bow and is known for Asian Games and World Championship team medals. Read such questions carefully: they ask who was first, not who is best known.

The correct answer is B, cross-country skiing and rifle shooting. In the biathlon a competitor skis a cross-country course and stops at a range to shoot at targets, with a penalty of extra distance or time for each miss; the sport grew out of military patrol skiing in Scandinavia. Option A is wrong because the combination of ski jumping with a cross-country race is the Nordic combined, which is the event most often confused with the biathlon. Option C is wrong because speed skating and figure skating are separate ice sports and are never combined into one event. Option D is wrong because alpine skiing and snowboarding are also separate disciplines with their own medal events. The modern biathlon is contested over several distances, with sprint, pursuit, individual, mass start and relay events, and the shooting is done both prone and standing.

The correct answer is B, India. The shuttle-and-racket game was played at Poona, now Pune, where British officers took it up; it was long known simply as Poona, and they carried it home where its rules were later settled. Option A is wrong as the country of origin, although England is where the modern rules were codified and where the All England Championships, the oldest tournament in the sport, began; this split between the folk game and the written rules is the heart of the question. Option C is wrong because China, though dominant in the modern sport, is linked in origin questions with cuju, the ancient ball game that prefigures football. Option D is wrong because Scotland is the home of golf. Along with chess, polo and snooker, badminton is one of the four origin answers that go to India.

The correct answer is B, Nanda Devi. Nanda Devi, 7,816 metres high, stands in Uttarakhand and is the highest peak lying wholly inside India. Option A is wrong because Kangchenjunga, 8,586 metres and the third highest mountain in the world, is the highest peak in India but lies on the boundary between Sikkim and Nepal, so it is not entirely within India; this is the distinction the question is testing, and the phrasing decides the answer. Option C is wrong because K2, 8,611 metres, is the second highest mountain in the world and lies in the Karakoram in the part of Kashmir under Pakistani control. Option D is wrong because Saltoro Kangri, in the Karakoram, is lower than Nanda Devi and also on a disputed boundary.

The correct answer is C, Japan. Jigoro Kano founded judo in 1882 at the Kodokan in Tokyo, building a grappling sport of throws and holds out of the older jujitsu, and judo entered the Olympic programme at the Tokyo Games. Option A is wrong because Korea is the home of taekwondo, a striking art of kicks and punches that is also the national sport there; judo and taekwondo are the commonest pair of distractors in this question. Option B is wrong because China is associated with wushu and the kung fu traditions. Option D is wrong because Thailand is the home of muay thai, Thai boxing. Japan also gives karate, which grew in Okinawa, and sumo, its traditional national sport, so the three Japanese answers are worth keeping together.