The first recipient of the Dadasaheb Phalke Award was:

The correct answer is B, Rabindranath Tagore. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for Gitanjali, becoming not only the first Indian but the first Asian of any country to receive a Nobel Prize. Option A, C. V. Raman, won the Physics prize in 1930 for the scattering effect named after him, and he was the first Indian to win in a science subject, which is a different first and the most common confusion in this question. Option C, Mother Teresa, received the Peace Prize in 1979 and was the first woman holding Indian citizenship to be honoured. Option D, Hargobind Khorana, shared the Medicine prize in 1968 for work on the genetic code, but he had taken American citizenship by then and is counted as a laureate of Indian origin.

The correct answer is B, C. V. Raman. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for his work on the scattering of light, the phenomenon known as the Raman effect, which he announced on 28 February 1928; that date is kept as National Science Day. Option A, Jagadish Chandra Bose, did pioneering work on radio waves and on plant physiology and is honoured in India for it, but he never received a Nobel Prize, which makes him the strongest distractor here. Option C, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, won the Physics prize in 1983 for his work on the structure and evolution of stars, by which time he was an American citizen; he was also Raman's nephew. Option D, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, shared the Chemistry prize in 2009 and holds British and American citizenship.

The correct answer is B, C. Rajagopalachari. The Bharat Ratna was instituted in 1954 and in that first year it went to three men: C. Rajagopalachari, the last Governor-General of India, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, then Vice-President and later President, and the physicist C. V. Raman. Option A, Jawaharlal Nehru, received the honour in 1955, a year later, which is exactly the near miss the examiner is testing. Option C, Indira Gandhi, received it in 1971 and was the first woman to be honoured. Option D, Lal Bahadur Shastri, received it in 1966, and his was the first Bharat Ratna conferred posthumously. Learn these four names with their four years together, because the question is set by swapping one for another. Note also that the Padma awards were instituted in the same year, 1954, and that the Bharat Ratna is announced by the President and carries no monetary grant.

The correct answer is B, Indira Gandhi. She received the Bharat Ratna in 1971, while she was Prime Minister, and she remains the first woman on the list. Option A, Mother Teresa, received it in 1980 and holds a different first: she was the first naturalised Indian, that is a person born abroad who had taken Indian citizenship, to be honoured, and she had received the Nobel Peace Prize the previous year. Option C, M. S. Subbulakshmi, the Carnatic vocalist, received it in 1998 and was the first musician to be given the award. Option D, Aruna Asaf Ali, the heroine of the Quit India Movement who hoisted the flag at the Gowalia Tank maidan in 1942, received the Bharat Ratna in 1997, and hers was a posthumous award.

The correct answer is A, Lal Bahadur Shastri. He died at Tashkent in January 1966 after signing the agreement that ended the war of 1965, and the Bharat Ratna was conferred on him that same year, the first time the honour was given after the recipient's death. Option B, Vallabhbhai Patel, who died in 1950, received the award much later, in 1991, so his was also posthumous but not the first. Option C, B. R. Ambedkar, the chairman of the drafting committee of the Constitution, died in 1956 and was honoured in 1990, again posthumously and again not the first. Option D, Rajiv Gandhi, was assassinated in 1991 and received the Bharat Ratna in that year. The question turns entirely on which posthumous award came earliest, so fix 1966 in memory.