Winter Sports and Mountaineering: Complete Exam Notes

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 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 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, 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 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, 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, Annapurna I. Annapurna I, 8,091 metres high and the lowest of the fourteen eight-thousanders, was climbed in 1950 by a French expedition led by Maurice Herzog, three years before Everest; it remains one of the most dangerous of the fourteen. Option A is wrong because Everest, though the highest, was first climbed in 1953. Option B is wrong because K2 was first climbed in 1954 by an Italian expedition. Option D is wrong because Nanga Parbat was first climbed in 1953 by Hermann Buhl, who made the final stretch alone and without oxygen. The sequence worth remembering is Annapurna in 1950, Everest and Nanga Parbat in 1953, K2 in 1954 and Kangchenjunga in 1955. Annapurna I is also the most dangerous of the fourteen peaks relative to the number of ascents, which is why the 1950 climb is remembered as a landmark in mountaineering.

The correct answer is B, Darjeeling. The Himalayan Mountaineering Institute was founded at Darjeeling in West Bengal in 1954, the year after the first ascent of Everest, and Tenzing Norgay served as its first director of field training. Option A is wrong because Uttarkashi in Uttarakhand is the home of the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering. Option C is wrong because Manali in Himachal Pradesh houses the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Institute of Mountaineering and Allied Sports. Option D is wrong because Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir has the Jawahar Institute of Mountaineering; a fifth institute, the National Institute of Mountaineering and Adventure Sports, is at Dirang in Arunachal Pradesh, and the five are a standard matching set. The institute was founded in the year after the first ascent of Everest, as part of the Indian response to that climb, and it trains climbers from across the country.

The correct answer is B, Beijing. Beijing hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008 and the Winter Olympics in 2022, becoming the first city to have held both. Option A is wrong because Tokyo has hosted the Summer Games twice, in 1964 and 2021, but never the Winter Games; Japan's Winter Games were at Sapporo in 1972 and Nagano in 1998. Option C is wrong because London has hosted the Summer Olympics three times, in 1908, 1948 and 2012, and has never hosted a Winter Games. Option D is wrong because Pyeongchang in South Korea hosted only the Winter Games of 2018; the Summer Games in that country were at Seoul in 1988. For comparison, Japan has hosted both a Summer Games, at Tokyo, and Winter Games, at Sapporo and Nagano, but never both in the same city, which is the point the question turns on.

The correct answer is A, Shiva Keshavan. Shiva Keshavan, from Himachal Pradesh, competed in the luge at six Winter Olympic Games beginning in 1998 and won titles at the Asian level, which makes him India's best known winter Olympian. Option B is wrong because Mohammad Arif Khan is an alpine skier from Kashmir, remembered for qualifying in two events at the Beijing Games of 2022, not for the luge. Option C is wrong because Jeremy Bujakowski was the alpine skier who represented India at its first Winter Olympics in 1964 at Innsbruck. Option D is wrong because that name is not associated with Indian winter sport. India has never won a Winter Olympic medal. Keshavan built his own training arrangements in the absence of a luge track in India, and he has since worked to develop the sport in the Himalayan states.

The correct answer is B, 8,848.86 metres. In December 2020 Nepal and China announced a jointly agreed new height for Mount Everest of 8,848.86 metres, after separate surveys from the two sides. Option A is wrong because 8,848 metres was the figure accepted earlier, from the Survey of India measurement, and is the value printed in older textbooks; a question will often ask for the revised figure precisely to separate the two. Option C is wrong because 8,611 metres is the height of K2, the second highest mountain in the world. Option D is wrong because 8,586 metres is the height of Kangchenjunga, the third highest in the world and the highest peak in India. The revised measurement followed separate surveys by the two countries, undertaken partly because the earthquake of 2015 raised the question of whether the summit had moved.