Sports GK Mixed Quiz: Set 31

The correct answer is A, Kapil Dev. The all-rounder from Chandigarh who played for Haryana was called the Haryana Hurricane for the pace of his bowling and the speed of his hitting, and he captained India to the World Cup of 1983. Option B is wrong because Virender Sehwag, who comes from Najafgarh in Delhi, is the Nawab of Najafgarh and also Multan ka Sultan, after his century at Multan. Option C is wrong because Chetan Sharma, although also a fast bowler from Haryana, carries no such nickname and is remembered chiefly for the first hat-trick in a World Cup. Option D is wrong because Yuvraj Singh, from Punjab, is called the Sixer King for his six sixes in an over, and Yuvi by his team-mates.

The correct answer is B, Munich 1972. Waldi, a dachshund in bright stripes, was the first mascot officially adopted by an Olympic Games, chosen because the dachshund is a German breed known for stamina. Option A is a trap that is close to being right: an unofficial figure called Schuss appeared at the Grenoble Winter Games of 1968, but Grenoble is not Mexico City, and the Mexico City Summer Games of 1968 had no official mascot. Option C is wrong because Montreal in 1976 had Amik, a beaver, the second official mascot. Option D is wrong because Moscow in 1980 had Misha the bear, the mascot that made the idea famous worldwide. Keep the order of the early official mascots in mind: Waldi at Munich, Amik at Montreal, Misha at Moscow and Sam at Los Angeles.

The correct answer is C, New Delhi. The first Asian Games were held at the National Stadium in New Delhi in 1951, after Guru Dutt Sondhi of India proposed a games for the newly independent countries of Asia in place of the older Far Eastern Games. Eleven nations competed and India finished second in the medal table behind Japan. Option A, Tokyo, hosted the third Asian Games in 1958 and is the city most associated with the Summer Olympics of 1964 in Asia, not the first Asian Games. Option B, Manila, hosted the second edition in 1954, so it comes immediately after Delhi in the sequence and is the commonest wrong answer. Option D, Jakarta, hosted the fourth edition in 1962 and again in 2018 along with Palembang. Remember the opening order as Delhi 1951, Manila 1954, Tokyo 1958 and Jakarta 1962.

The correct answer is B, Karnam Malleswari. She won the bronze medal in weightlifting in the 69 kilogram category at the Sydney Games of 2000, becoming the first Indian woman to win an Olympic medal of any colour. A is wrong because P. T. Usha, for all her achievement on the track, finished fourth in the 400 metres hurdles at Los Angeles in 1984, missing bronze by one hundredth of a second, so she never won an Olympic medal; this near miss is itself a popular question. C is wrong because Mary Kom won her boxing bronze at London in 2012, twelve years after Malleswari. D is wrong because Saina Nehwal won her badminton bronze at the same London Games of 2012. The order to remember is Malleswari in 2000, then Mary Kom and Saina Nehwal in 2012.

The correct answer is B, P. T. Usha. Payyoli is her village in the Kozhikode district of Kerala, and the word Express was added for the speed that made her Asia's leading woman sprinter in the nineteen-eighties; she is also called the Golden Girl of India. Option A is wrong because Anju Bobby George is a long jumper and the first Indian to win a medal at a World Athletics Championship, and she carries no such nickname. Option C is wrong because Shiny Wilson, also from Kerala and a middle-distance runner of the same period, is a frequent distractor in this question. Option D is wrong because Hima Das, the sprinter from Assam who won gold at the World Under-20 Championships, is called Dhing Express after her village, a nickname built on the same pattern and often swapped with this one.

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 A, the 1982 Asian Games at New Delhi. Appu was the cheerful baby elephant created as the mascot of the ninth Asian Games, and the figure became so popular that an amusement park in Delhi was named after it. The same Games brought colour television to India and gave the capital the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. Option B is wrong because the mascot of the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi was Shera, a tiger, with the slogan Come Out and Play. Option C is wrong because the mascot of the 2011 Cricket World Cup was Stumpy, a young elephant with a cricket bat, a different animal character from a different event, and the two elephants are often mixed up. Option D is wrong because the mascot of the 2017 FIFA Under-17 World Cup was Kheleo, a clouded leopard chosen to represent the North East.

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 A, Milkha Singh. The sprinter won gold in the four hundred metres at the Asian Games and at the Commonwealth Games and finished fourth in the Olympic final at Rome in 1960, and the name was given to him in Pakistan after he beat the local champion there. Option B is wrong because Fauja Singh was the marathon runner famous for competing at a very advanced age, known as the Turbaned Tornado, a different nickname of the same kind. Option C is wrong because Bishan Singh Bedi was a left-arm spinner and captain of the Indian cricket team. Option D is wrong because Balbir Singh Senior was the hockey centre forward who won three Olympic golds, and the trap in this question is to pick any well-known Sikh sportsperson instead of the sprinter.

The correct answer is C, 1984. The Sports Authority of India was set up in 1984 as a society so that the stadiums and other facilities built for the Asian Games held at Delhi in 1982 would continue to be used for training rather than fall idle. It now runs the national centres of excellence, the regional training centres and the talent schemes, and it has its headquarters at New Delhi. Option A, 1961, is the year the coaching institute at Patiala, today the Netaji Subhas National Institute of Sports, was founded. Option B, 1982, is the year of the Asian Games at Delhi and of the creation of a separate Department of Sports, so it is the closest wrong answer. Option D, 2001, is the year of the second National Sports Policy. The order to remember is 1982 for the Department, 1984 for the Authority.

The correct answer is C, the 19th Games in 2010. Delhi hosted the nineteenth Commonwealth Games in 2010, the first and so far the only time India has held them. Shera the tiger was the mascot, the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium held the ceremonies and the athletics, and India finished second in the medal table with 101 medals, including 38 gold. Option A is wrong because the seventeenth Games in 2002 were held at Manchester in England. Option B is wrong because the eighteenth Games in 2006 were held at Melbourne in Australia, where India finished fourth. Option D is wrong because the twentieth Games in 2014 were held at Glasgow in Scotland. Linking the edition number to the year is the safest way to answer: Manchester 2002, Melbourne 2006, Delhi 2010 and Glasgow 2014 run in a simple four year chain.

The correct answer is B, Uttarakhand. The 38th National Games were held in Uttarakhand in 2025, with competition spread over Dehradun, Haldwani, Rudrapur, Haridwar and other centres, and with Mauli, a Himalayan monal, as the mascot; the monal is the state bird of Uttarakhand. Option A, Himachal Pradesh, is the other Himalayan state of the western range and is offered because the two are frequently interchanged, but it did not host this edition. Option C, Goa, hosted the previous edition, the 37th, in 2023, so it is the closest wrong answer in the sequence. Option D, Madhya Pradesh, has hosted Khelo India Youth Games but not a National Games edition of this period. The recent chain to memorise is Kerala in 2015 for the 35th, Gujarat in 2022 for the 36th, Goa in 2023 for the 37th and Uttarakhand in 2025 for the 38th.

The correct answer is B, the Wizard of Hockey, also given as the Magician of Hockey. Dhyan Chand played centre forward in the Indian teams that won Olympic gold in 1928, 1932 and 1936, and his control of the ball was so complete that opponents suspected the stick itself. National Sports Day in India is observed on his birthday, the twenty-ninth of August, and the Dhyan Chand Award is named after him. Option A is wrong because the Flying Horse is a nickname of the hockey player Leslie Claudius in some accounts and is not the standard answer here. Option C is wrong because no such title is in use. Option D is wrong because Iron Man in Indian public memory belongs to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, not to a sportsperson.

The correct answer is D, Moscow 1980. India beat Spain 4–3 in the final at the Moscow Games to win its eighth Olympic hockey gold, under the captaincy of Vasudevan Bhaskaran, and the team has not won the gold since. At the Tokyo Games of 2020 India returned to the podium with a bronze after a gap of forty one years.

Option A, Tokyo 1964, was the seventh gold, won against Pakistan in the final. Option B, Mexico City 1968, and Option C, Munich 1972, were the two Games at which India finished third and took the bronze medal, the first slip after the long golden run. The shift to artificial astroturf pitches from the Montreal Games of 1976 is one reason usually given for the decline that followed.

The correct answer is A, it was the first World Cup held outside England. The first three World Cups of 1975, 1979 and 1983 were all played in England, and the 1987 tournament, sponsored as the Reliance Cup, moved the event to the subcontinent for the first time; the overs were reduced from sixty to fifty, which has remained the standard since. Australia won the final against England at Kolkata. Option B is wrong because India's World Cup wins came in 1983 in England and in 2011 at home. Option C is wrong because day and night matches with a white ball became part of the World Cup in Australia and New Zealand in 1992, along with coloured clothing. Option D is wrong because the Duckworth Lewis method for rain affected matches was introduced in the late nineteen nineties, well after 1987.

The correct answer is B, Steffi Graf. In 1988 the German won the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open, and then took the Olympic singles gold medal at Seoul, the first Games at which tennis was again a full medal sport. No other player, man or woman, has completed all five in a single year.

Option A, Martina Navratilova, won eighteen Major singles titles including nine at Wimbledon, and held all four at once across two seasons, but never inside one calendar year and never with an Olympic gold. Option C, Margaret Court, completed the calendar Grand Slam in 1970 and holds the all-time record of twenty-four women's singles Majors, but tennis was not then an Olympic medal sport. Option D, Serena Williams, holds the Open Era women's record of twenty-three Major singles titles and has Olympic gold medals, but her four in a row, the so-called Serena Slam, ran across 2014 and 2015 rather than one year.

The correct answer is A, Mary Kom. The boxer from Manipur, a multiple world amateur champion and an Olympic medallist from the London Games of 2012, was called Magnificent Mary by the international boxing federation, and the name has stayed with her. Option B is wrong because Nikhat Zareen, the world champion boxer from Telangana, has no such established nickname. Option C is wrong because Lovlina Borgohain, the Olympic medallist from Assam, is likewise known by her own name. Option D is wrong because Sarita Devi, also a boxer from Manipur of the same generation, is the closest distractor that an examiner can offer in this question, which is why the state alone is not enough to identify the answer. The safe way to answer a boxing nickname question is to pair the nickname with the decade: Magnificent Mary belongs to the boxer of the London Olympics, and the later world champions of the same weight classes are known simply by their own names.

The correct answer is B, the Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai. India beat Sri Lanka in the final of the 2011 World Cup at the Wankhede, with Mahendra Singh Dhoni finishing the match with a six and Gautam Gambhir making the highest score of the innings. It was the first time a host country won the fifty over World Cup on its own soil. Option A, Eden Gardens in Kolkata, hosted the 1987 World Cup final and the final of the 2016 World Twenty20, which is why it is a convincing distractor. Option C, the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru, hosted league matches in 2011 but no final. Option D, Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi, now renamed the Arun Jaitley Stadium, also hosted matches rather than the final. India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh were the three co-hosts of that edition.

The correct answer is C, Shoaib Akhtar. The Pakistani fast bowler came from Rawalpindi and bowled some of the quickest deliveries ever recorded, which earned him the name Rawalpindi Express, built on the same pattern as the Payyoli Express and the Chakda Express. Option A is wrong because Wasim Akram, the left-arm bowler who mastered movement with the old ball, is the Sultan of Swing. Option B is wrong because Waqar Younis, his partner in that attack, was known for reverse swing and toe-crushing yorkers but carries no train nickname. Option D is wrong because Imran Khan, the all-rounder who captained Pakistan to the World Cup of 1992, was called the Lion of Lahore, after a different city, which makes him the trap in this question.

The correct answer is C, England. England beat Spain in the final at the Salt Lake Stadium in Kolkata to win the 2017 Under-17 World Cup, the first FIFA tournament of any kind staged in India. The mascot was Kheleo, a clouded leopard, and matches were played at Kolkata, New Delhi, Guwahati, Margao, Kochi and Navi Mumbai. Option A, Spain, reached the final and lost it, which makes it the strongest distractor. Option B, Brazil, finished third in the tournament after losing in the semi-final, and is a tempting answer because of its record in senior football. Option D, India, took part only as the host, played its three group matches at New Delhi and did not advance; that appearance remains India's only one at a FIFA World Cup of any age group. India also hosted the Under-17 Women's World Cup in 2022.