Static GK Quiz: First in the World

The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched aboard Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961 and completed a single orbit of the Earth, becoming the first human being in space.

The Soviet cosmonaut flew alone aboard Vostok 6 in June 1963 and spent nearly three days in orbit, becoming the first woman in space, two years after Yuri Gagarin's flight.

The American astronaut commanded the Apollo 11 mission and stepped out of the lunar module on 20 July 1969, becoming the first human being to walk on the Moon.

The Norwegian explorer and his party reached the South Pole in December 1911, using dog sledges and a carefully laid line of supply depots, and returned safely.

In 1893 New Zealand, then a self-governing colony, gave women the right to vote in national elections, the first country in the world to do so, after a long campaign led by Kate Sheppard.

She became Prime Minister of Ceylon, the island now called Sri Lanka, in 1960, and was the first woman anywhere in the world to head a government as Prime Minister.

The South African surgeon carried out the first transplant of a human heart at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town in 1967, on the patient Louis Washkansky, who survived the operation but lived only a further eighteen days.

The Penny Black, issued in 1840 and bearing the head of Queen Victoria, was the world's first adhesive postage stamp, and it came out of the postal reform that fixed a single low rate paid by the sender rather than the receiver.

She shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 for the study of radioactivity and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone in 1911 for the discovery of radium and polonium, becoming the first person to receive the prize twice.

Uruguay both hosted and won the first FIFA World Cup in 1930, beating Argentina in the final at Montevideo, and the tournament was awarded to the country partly because it had won the Olympic football title twice in the preceding years.