Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize in 2006 for which of the following novels?

The correct answer is D, 6. The Nobel Prize is awarded every year in six categories: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace and Economic Sciences. The first five were named in the will of Alfred Nobel and have been given since 1901, while the prize in Economic Sciences was instituted by the Sveriges Riksbank in 1968 and awarded for the first time in 1969.

Option A, 5, is the number of categories in Nobel's own will and is therefore the strongest distractor, but the count asked for today includes economics. Option B, 7, is one more than the list and matches no prize category. Option C, 4, would leave out two of the sciences altogether. The Peace Prize among the six is decided in Norway and presented at Oslo, while the other five are presented at Stockholm on 10 December each year.

The correct answer is A, Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for Gitanjali, the English rendering of his own Bengali poems. He was the first Indian and also the first person from Asia to be awarded a Nobel Prize in any category, and the prize brought Indian writing to the notice of readers across Europe.

Option B, Mother Teresa, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, sixty six years later, for her work among the poor and the dying in Kolkata. Option C, Amartya Sen, won the prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for his work on welfare economics and famines. Option D, C. V. Raman, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for the scattering of light known as the Raman Effect, which makes him the first Indian to win a Nobel in the sciences but still seventeen years after Tagore.

The correct answer is A, Mother Teresa. She was born at Skopje, came to India as a nun, took Indian citizenship in 1948 and founded the Missionaries of Charity at Kolkata in 1950. The Nobel Peace Prize was given to her in 1979 for her work among the poorest of the poor, and she remains the only woman from India to have received it.

Option B, Nargis Dutt, was a film actress who was given the Padma Shri and was later a member of the Rajya Sabha, but she was never a Nobel laureate. Option C, Indira Gandhi, was Prime Minister of India and received the Bharat Ratna in 1971; no Indian Prime Minister has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Option D, Sarojini Naidu, called the Nightingale of India, was the first woman President of the Indian National Congress and the first woman Governor of a state, but she too won no Nobel Prize.

The correct answer is B, Gitanjali, a collection of devotional poems that Tagore himself rendered into English prose poetry. The Nobel Prize for Literature came to him in 1913 for these verses, the citation praising their sensitive and beautiful language, and it made him the first Asian Nobel laureate.

Option A, Gora, is one of Tagore's major novels, a long work about identity and reform in Bengal, but not the book the prize was given for. Option C, The Home and the World, the English title of Ghare Baire, is another of his novels, later filmed by Satyajit Ray. Option D, Chokher Bali, is an early novel of his about widowhood and desire. All three are genuine works of Tagore, which is what makes the options plausible, but only Gitanjali carried him to the Nobel.

The correct answer is C, 1930. Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was given the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for his work on the scattering of light and for the effect that carries his name, by which light passing through a transparent medium changes in wavelength. He was the first Indian and the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences.

Option A, 1913, is the year of Tagore's Nobel Prize for Literature, not of Raman's. Option B, 1928, is the year in which Raman announced the discovery itself, on 28 February, a date observed in India as National Science Day; the prize followed two years later. Option D, 1947, is the year of independence and has nothing to do with the award. Raman was also given the Bharat Ratna in 1954, in the first list of that honour.