Ryder Cup is associated with which sport?

The correct answer is D, Field hockey. A 16-yard hit is the free hit given to the defending team in field hockey when an attacker sends the ball over the back line without a goal being scored. The ball is placed in line with the point where it crossed the line, 16 yards or about 14.63 metres out from the inner edge of the back line, and a defender takes the hit while opponents stand at least five metres away. The same hit is awarded when an attacking player commits an offence inside the shooting circle. A is wrong because golf is measured in holes, pars and the yardage of fairways and has no such hit. B is wrong because lawn tennis uses terms such as deuce, ace, let and smash. C is wrong because cricket's restarts are the no-ball, the wide and a free hit of an entirely different kind. Exam tip: hockey terms - 16-yard hit, penalty corner, and the penalty stroke taken from 6.4 metres.

The correct answer is C, 400 metres. Hima Das, who comes from Dhing in Assam and is called the Dhing Express, won the women's 400 metres at the World Under-20 Championships held at Tampere in Finland in 2018. She became the first Indian to win a gold medal in a track event at a world championship of any age group.

Option A, 100 metres, is a sprint she has run at domestic meets but not the race of that gold medal. Option B, 200 metres, is the event in which she has also competed and won Asian-level relay and individual honours, so it reads plausibly. Option D, long jump, is a field event and belongs to the Anju Bobby George line of Indian achievements rather than to Hima Das. The pairing to remember is Hima Das with the 400 metres flat and P. T. Usha with the 400 metres hurdles.

The correct answer is C, triple jump. Field events are those in which an athlete jumps or throws rather than races, and the triple jump, with its hop, step and jump, is measured for distance in a sand pit. The other field events are the long jump, high jump, pole vault, shot put, discus, hammer and javelin.

Option A, the 110 metres hurdles, is a track event: it is a race over ten hurdles in lanes. Option B, the 4 x 400 metres relay, is also a track event, run by four athletes who pass a baton within a 30-metre take-over zone. Option D, the 3000 metres steeplechase, is a track race over barriers and a water jump, and its obstacles tempt candidates into calling it a field event. If the athlete is timed against a clock it is a track event; if the result is a distance or a height, it is a field event.

The correct answer is B, 400 metres. Milkha Singh reached the 400 metres final at Rome in 1960 and finished fourth in a race so close that the first four all broke the existing Olympic mark. His time stood as the Indian national record for close to four decades, and the near miss is the single most quoted moment in Indian athletics before 2021.

Option A, 200 metres, was an event he ran and won at the 1958 Asian Games, but not the Rome final in question. Option C, 800 metres, is the event in which Sriram Singh reached an Olympic final, at Montreal in 1976. Option D, 110 metres hurdles, is where Gurbachan Singh Randhawa finished fifth at Tokyo in 1964, another famous fourth-or-fifth place that papers deliberately mix with this one. Tie the three together: Milkha 1960, Randhawa 1964, Sriram 1976.

The correct answer is B, Monaco. The body was founded in 1912 as the International Amateur Athletic Federation, became the International Association of Athletics Federations, and was renamed World Athletics in 2019. Its offices are in Monaco, and it fixes the rules, ratifies world records and organises the World Athletics Championships, first held at Helsinki in 1983.

Option A, Lausanne in Switzerland, is the seat of the International Olympic Committee, which is a different organisation and the commonest confusion in this question. Option C, Zurich, hosts the headquarters of FIFA, the world football body, and a famous annual athletics meet, but not World Athletics itself. Option D, Paris, is the city where the body was founded at a meeting of national federations and where the 2003 World Championships were held, which makes it a well-placed distractor.