First in the World: Space, Exploration and Records

The correct answer is B, Yuri Gagarin. 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 day is now marked every year as the anniversary of human spaceflight.

Option A, Alexei Leonov, was also a Soviet cosmonaut, but his own first came four years later, in March 1965, when he stepped out of Voskhod 2 and made the first spacewalk. Option C, Neil Armstrong, was the first person to set foot on the Moon, in July 1969, which is a different first and the commonest confusion in this question. Option D, Rakesh Sharma, was the first Indian in space, in 1984 aboard a Soviet mission, and he is offered whenever the paper wants to see if the candidate has read the words in the world rather than in India.

The correct answer is C, Valentina Tereshkova. 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.

Option A, Svetlana Savitskaya, was the second woman in space and, in 1984, the first woman to walk in space, so she answers a neighbouring question rather than this one. Option B, Sally Ride, was the first American woman in space, in 1983, and the trap works only if the candidate reads American for world. Option D, Kalpana Chawla, was the first woman of Indian origin to go into space, flying with NASA in 1997 and dying in the Columbia accident of 2003. Fix the pair as Gagarin for the first man and Tereshkova for the first woman, both of the Soviet Union.

The correct answer is D, Neil Armstrong. 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.

Option B, Edwin Buzz Aldrin, followed him out of the same module minutes later and was therefore the second person on the Moon, which is exactly the swap the paper setter is testing. Option A, Michael Collins, was the third member of Apollo 11, but he remained in the command module in lunar orbit and never landed. Option C, Yuri Gagarin, was the first human in space in 1961, a Soviet first that belongs to a different question and to a different country; he never travelled to the Moon. Remember the order for Apollo 11 as Armstrong, then Aldrin, with Collins in orbit.

The correct answer is A, Roald Amundsen. 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.

Option B, Robert Falcon Scott, led the British party that reached the same point about a month later, in January 1912, only to find Amundsen's tent already there; Scott and his companions died on the return journey, and he is the standard distractor because the race between the two is so well known. Option C, Robert Peary, belongs to the other end of the Earth, being credited in most examination lists with reaching the North Pole in 1909. Option D, Ernest Shackleton, led famous Antarctic expeditions, including the Endurance voyage, but never stood at the Pole itself.

The correct answer is C, New Zealand. 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.

Option D, Australia, followed within a decade and is the closest distractor, but its franchise came later and did not extend to all women at once. Option B, the United Kingdom, gave the vote to some women only in 1918 and on equal terms with men in 1928. Option A, the United States, extended the vote to women through the nineteenth amendment to its constitution in 1920. The order to remember is New Zealand first, then Australia, with Britain and the United States after the First World War.

The correct answer is B, Sirimavo Bandaranaike. 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.

Option A, Indira Gandhi, became the first woman Prime Minister of India in 1966, six years later, and she is the distractor set for candidates who read India for the world. Option C, Golda Meir, became Prime Minister of Israel in 1969. Option D, Margaret Thatcher, became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1979 and is remembered as the first woman to hold that office in Britain. Keep the first woman President separate: Isabel Peron of Argentina took that office in 1974, and Vigdis Finnbogadottir of Iceland was the first woman elected President, in 1980.

The correct answer is A, Christiaan Barnard. 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.

Option B, Alexander Fleming, discovered penicillin in 1928 and belongs to a different first altogether. Option C, Joseph Lister, introduced antiseptic surgery in the nineteenth century and is remembered as the father of modern surgery, which makes him a plausible but wrong choice here. Option D, Robert Edwards, developed the technique of in vitro fertilisation that led to the birth of Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, in 1978, and won a Nobel Prize for it; that is the neighbouring medical first most often set with this one.

The correct answer is C, Britain. 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.

Option A, France, and option B, the United States, both issued their own stamps within the following decade, after the British reform proved successful, so they are late rather than first. Option D, Switzerland, issued early cantonal stamps in the 1840s, which makes it the most tempting distractor for a well-read candidate, but these also came after the Penny Black. Note the related Indian fact kept separate in the paper: the first postage stamp of India was issued in the Sindh province in 1852, and the first all-India stamps came in 1854.

The correct answer is B, Marie Curie. 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. She was also the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize at all.

Option A, Linus Pauling, did win two Nobel Prizes, in Chemistry in 1954 and Peace in 1962, and is the only person to win two unshared prizes, but he came half a century after Marie Curie. Option C, Albert Einstein, received a single Nobel Prize, in Physics in 1921, awarded for the photoelectric effect rather than for relativity. Option D, Frederick Sanger, won the Chemistry prize twice, in 1958 and 1980, again long after Curie.

The correct answer is D, Uruguay. 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.

Option C, Argentina, lost that first final and is therefore the sharpest distractor; the runner-up is offered whenever the winner is asked. Option B, Italy, won the next two World Cups, in 1934 and 1938. Option A, Brazil, has won the tournament more often than any other country but did not win it first. Keep the cricket parallel separate in your notes: the first Cricket World Cup was played in England in 1975 and was won by the West Indies.