Karnam Malleswari won her Olympic bronze medal in weightlifting at which Games?

The correct answer is B, two. Olympic weightlifting consists of the snatch and the clean and jerk, and a competitor is allowed three attempts at each; the best valid lift in each is added to give the total that decides the medal. A is wrong because a single lift would not test both the explosive pull of the snatch and the two-stage strength of the clean and jerk, and no international competition has ever been held on one lift. C is wrong, though it was once right: a third lift, the clean and press, was part of the programme until it was dropped after the Munich Games of 1972 because judging how strictly the press was performed proved too subjective. D is wrong because four lifts describes no form of the sport; candidates who choose it are usually thinking of the three lifts of powerlifting with one added. Remember that powerlifting has three lifts and weightlifting two.

The correct answer is C, the bench press. Powerlifting is made up of three lifts, the squat, the bench press and the deadlift, in none of which the bar finishes overhead, and the sport is not on the Olympic programme; para powerlifting, contested at the Paralympic Games, is the bench press alone. A is wrong because the snatch is one of the two Olympic weightlifting lifts, in which the bar travels from the platform to arms overhead in a single movement. B is wrong because the clean and jerk is the other Olympic lift, performed in two stages with a pause at the shoulders. D is wrong because the jerk is not a separate event at all but the second half of the clean and jerk, the drive that takes the bar from the shoulders to overhead. The clean distinction to memorise is two lifts overhead for weightlifting, three lifts not overhead for powerlifting.

The correct answer is B, the pommel horse. The men's programme has six apparatus, the floor exercise, pommel horse, still rings, vault, parallel bars and horizontal bar, and of these the pommel horse, the rings, the parallel bars and the horizontal bar appear in no women's event. A is wrong because the vault is one of the two apparatus common to men and women, the other being the floor exercise, which is why men compete on six and women on four. C is wrong because the balance beam is a women's apparatus, a padded beam ten centimetres wide on which steadiness is prized. D is wrong because the uneven bars, two horizontal bars set at different heights, also belong only to the women's programme; candidates confuse them with the men's parallel bars, which are at the same height and set side by side. Learn the two common apparatus first and the rest follows.

The correct answer is C, Nadia Comaneci of Romania, who received the first perfect ten in Olympic gymnastics at the Montreal Games of 1976, at the age of fourteen; the scoreboard of the day could show only three digits and displayed her mark as 1.00. A is wrong because Larisa Latynina of the Soviet Union, who competed in the 1950s and 1960s, is remembered for a different record, the most Olympic medals won by any gymnast, eighteen in all. B is wrong because Olga Korbut, also of the Soviet Union, was the star of the Munich Games of 1972 and made the sport popular on television, but she was not awarded a ten at the Olympics. D is wrong because Simone Biles competed long after the ten-point system was abolished in 2006 in favour of open-ended scoring that adds a difficulty mark to an execution mark, so a perfect ten could not be given to her.

The correct answer is A, the Federation Internationale de Gymnastique, usually shortened to FIG. Founded in 1881, it is the oldest international sports federation in the world, older than the modern Olympic movement itself, and it has its headquarters at Lausanne in Switzerland. It governs artistic, rhythmic, trampoline, acrobatic and aerobic gymnastics and sets the code of points by which routines are scored. B is wrong because no body called the International Gymnastics Council exists; the name is invented to sound plausible. C is wrong for the same reason, and the mention of a single discipline is a clue, since the real federation covers them all. D is wrong because the International Weightlifting Federation, founded in 1905, governs weightlifting; it is the correct answer to the companion question and is offered here to catch a candidate who reads the two sports as one.