First in India: Men and Women in Office, Science and Sport

The correct answer is B, Dr. Rajendra Prasad. He had presided over the Constituent Assembly that framed the Constitution and became the first President when the Constitution came into force in 1950. He remains the only person to have served two full terms in the office.

Option A, Jawaharlal Nehru, was the first Prime Minister and never held the presidency, and the two offices are the commonest pair to be swapped in this question. Option C, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, was the first Vice-President and became the second President only after Rajendra Prasad. Option D, Dr. Zakir Husain, was the third President, and he carries two firsts of his own that papers like to ask: he was the first Muslim President of India and the first President to die while in office. Keep the sequence of the first three Presidents in mind and none of these can confuse you.

The correct answer is C, Rabindranath Tagore. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for Gitanjali and was the first Asian of any nationality to win a Nobel Prize, which is a second fact worth carrying.

Option A, C. V. Raman, is the answer to a closely related question: he was the first Indian to win a Nobel Prize in a science, taking the Physics prize in 1930 for the scattering of light now named the Raman effect. Option B, Mother Teresa, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 as an Indian citizen, and is therefore the first answer to the question about the Peace Prize, not the first overall. Option D, Amartya Sen, won the prize in Economic Sciences in 1998, decades after Tagore. Read the stem carefully, because the examiner separates first Indian, first in a science and first in peace.

The correct answer is A, Rakesh Sharma. The Indian Air Force pilot flew aboard the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz T-11 in 1984 under a joint programme and spent about a week on the Salyut 7 space station, becoming the first Indian citizen in space.

Option B, Kalpana Chawla, was the first woman of Indian origin to go into space, flying with NASA in 1997, which is a different first and the commonest distractor here. Option C, Ravish Malhotra, was the back-up cosmonaut for the same 1984 mission and trained alongside Rakesh Sharma but did not fly, so he is placed in the options to catch a half-remembered fact. Option D, Sunita Williams, is an American astronaut of Indian origin known for her long-duration stays aboard the International Space Station. Read whether the stem asks for an Indian citizen or a person of Indian origin.

The correct answer is B, Justice M. Fathima Beevi, who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1989, about four decades after the court began work, and later served as Governor of Tamil Nadu.

Option A, Justice Leila Seth, holds a different first: she was the first woman Chief Justice of a High Court, of Himachal Pradesh, and she never sat on the Supreme Court. She is the distractor placed here most often, so learn the two together. Option C, Justice Ruma Pal, and option D, Justice Sujata Manohar, were both later women judges of the Supreme Court and are correct only in the sense of belonging to the small group of women who reached it, not in being the first. Note also that the first woman Chief Justice of India has not yet been appointed, so no name can be offered for that.

The correct answer is C, Indira Gandhi, who became Prime Minister in 1966 and was also the first woman to receive the Bharat Ratna, in 1971. Both facts are set from this chapter.

Option A, Pratibha Devisingh Patil, was the first woman President of India, taking office in 2007, and the President and the Prime Minister are the pair most often swapped in this question. Option B, Sarojini Naidu, was the first woman Governor of an Indian state, of Uttar Pradesh, and the first Indian woman to preside over the Indian National Congress, at Kanpur in 1925. Option D, Sucheta Kripalani, was the first woman Chief Minister of an Indian state, also of Uttar Pradesh. All four women hold a first of some kind, which is exactly why the examiner groups them; attach each name to its own office.

The correct answer is A, Major Somnath Sharma. He was decorated after his death for the action at Badgam in which his company held back the advance on the Srinagar airfield in November 1947, and his is the first name on the roll of the Param Vir Chakra.

Option B, Naik Jadunath Singh, also received the award for action in the same operations of 1947 and 1948, but later than Somnath Sharma, which makes him the trap in this question. Option C, Captain Vikram Batra, received the award after his death for the Kargil operations of 1999. Option D, Abdul Hamid, received it for destroying enemy tanks in the war of 1965. Remember the separate peacetime award as well: the Ashoka Chakra, whose first woman recipient was Neerja Bhanot.

The correct answer is A, Satyendranath Tagore, the elder brother of Rabindranath Tagore, who qualified in 1863 and became the first Indian member of the Indian Civil Service at a time when the examination was held only in England.

Option B, Surendranath Banerjee, cleared the examination a few years later and was among the earliest Indians in the service, but he was dismissed from it and turned to nationalist politics, founding the Indian Association; that story makes him a strong distractor. Option C, Romesh Chunder Dutt, also entered the service in the same early group and is remembered for his economic writing on British rule, in particular the drain of wealth argument. Option D, Anandamohan Bose, was the first Indian wrangler at Cambridge, a different academic first altogether, and is placed here to catch that confusion.

The correct answer is B, Sarojini Naidu, who presided over the Kanpur session of 1925 and was the first Indian woman to occupy the chair. She later became the first woman Governor of an Indian state, of Uttar Pradesh.

Option A, Annie Besant, presided at Calcutta in 1917 and was the first woman of any nationality to lead the Congress, but she was of Irish birth, so the word Indian in the stem decides between the two. This is the single most frequently set trap in the chapter. Option C, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, holds a different first: she was the first woman to preside over the United Nations General Assembly. Option D, Aruna Asaf Ali, is remembered for hoisting the flag at the Gowalia Tank maidan during the Quit India movement of 1942 and never chaired a Congress session.

The correct answer is B, Abhinav Bindra, who won the ten-metre air rifle event at Beijing in 2008. India had won gold before that only in team hockey, so this was the first individual gold in the country's Olympic history.

Option A, K. D. Jadhav, holds the related first: he won India's first individual Olympic medal of any colour, a wrestling bronze at Helsinki in 1952, and the examiner relies on candidates mixing the medal with the gold. Option C, Neeraj Chopra, won the gold in the javelin throw at the Tokyo Games, which was India's first Olympic gold in athletics but came long after Bindra. Option D, Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, won a silver in double trap shooting at Athens in 2004, the individual medal immediately before Bindra's gold. Fix the order: Jadhav, Rathore, Bindra.

The correct answer is B, Sam Manekshaw, who led the Indian Army as Chief of the Army Staff during the war of 1971 and was the first officer raised to the five-star rank of Field Marshal.

Option A, General K. M. Cariappa, was given the same rank many years later, but his own first is different and is asked just as often: he was the first Indian Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, taking charge in 1949. Option C, Arjan Singh, was promoted to Marshal of the Indian Air Force, the equivalent five-star rank in the air force, so he is a rank-based distractor rather than an army one. Option D, General J. N. Chaudhuri, commanded the army during the war of 1965 but held no five-star rank. Keep the other service firsts with these: Subroto Mukerjee was the first Indian Chief of the Air Staff and R. D. Katari the first Indian Chief of the Naval Staff.

The correct answer is B, Bachendri Pal, who stood on the summit in 1984 as a member of an Indian expedition and became the first Indian woman to climb the world's highest peak.

Option A, Santosh Yadav, holds the next distinction in the same sequence: she was the first woman in the world to climb Everest twice, and she is the usual distractor. Option C, Arunima Sinha, was the first woman amputee to reach the summit, a later and separate first. Option D, Premlata Agarwal, became the oldest Indian woman to climb it. Learn the Everest chain in order, since the examiner picks any link from it: Tenzing Norgay with Edmund Hillary made the first ascent in 1953, Captain Avtar Singh Cheema was the first from an Indian expedition in 1965, and Bachendri Pal was the first Indian woman in 1984.

The correct answer is A, Sukumar Sen, an officer of the Indian Civil Service who was appointed the first Chief Election Commissioner and conducted the first general elections to the Lok Sabha and the state assemblies, an exercise held on a scale never attempted before anywhere.

Option B, T. N. Seshan, is the best remembered holder of the office because of the strict enforcement of the model code of conduct in the 1990s, and for that reason he is the commonest wrong answer here. Option C, K. V. K. Sundaram, and option D, S. P. Sen Verma, were his early successors and are placed here simply as plausible names from the same list. Group this fact with the other constitutional firsts: Justice H. J. Kania as the first Chief Justice of India and G. V. Mavalankar as the first Speaker of the Lok Sabha.