The secretariat of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation is located in which city?

The correct answer is B, Paris. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization was founded in 1946 and works from Paris in France. It is the agency behind the World Heritage List, the international literacy programmes and the biosphere reserve network, and it also keeps the list of intangible cultural heritage on which Indian entries such as Kutiyattam and the Kumbh Mela appear.

Option A, New York, is the headquarters of the United Nations itself and of UNICEF and UNDP, not of UNESCO. Option C, Geneva, holds the World Health Organization, the International Labour Organization and the World Trade Organization, so it is the commonest trap in this question. Option D, Rome, is the city of the three food bodies, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Programme and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

The correct answer is D, Philippines. The Asian Development Bank was founded in 1966 to lend for development in Asia and the Pacific and has its headquarters at Manila, the capital of the Philippines. India is a founding member and among its largest borrowers. Japan and the United States hold the largest shares in the bank, and its president has by convention always been Japanese.

Option A, Malaysia, hosts no such bank at Kuala Lumpur, although the city holds regional offices of several bodies. Option B, Indonesia, is the seat of the ASEAN Secretariat at Jakarta, which is a different institution. Option C, Thailand, hosts the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific at Bangkok, and the Bangkok Declaration of 1967 created ASEAN, so it is a plausible but wrong choice here.

The correct answer is C, International Monetary Fund. The conference held in 1944 at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in the United States set up two twin institutions, the International Monetary Fund to keep exchange rates orderly and help countries facing balance of payments difficulty, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development to lend for reconstruction and development. Both have their headquarters at Washington DC.

Option A is wrong because the United Nations was created by its own Charter, signed at San Francisco in 1945. Option B, UNESCO, was founded in 1946 as a specialised agency for education, science and culture. Option D, the International Labour Organization, is older than all of them, set up in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles. Only the IMF and the World Bank are called the Bretton Woods institutions.

The correct answer is D, 2 only. The United Nations works in six official languages, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. Of the four names in the list, Arabic, Spanish and Chinese are all official, so only German, the second item, is not. Arabic was the last of the six to be added, in 1973. Of the six, English and French are also the working languages of the Secretariat.

Option A is wrong because Arabic is official, having been added in 1973. Option B is wrong for the same reason and because Chinese was official from the beginning as one of the languages of the founding members. Option C again wrongly counts Arabic as not official. Only option D keeps German alone, and German is not a UN language although Germany is a large contributor to the UN budget.

The correct answer is B, International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, known by its short form IUPAC. It is the world authority on chemical nomenclature, so it approves the names and symbols of newly discovered elements, standardises the naming of compounds and maintains the recommended values of atomic weights. Elements such as oganesson and nihonium received their names through this body after the discovery claims were verified.

Option A, UNESCO, promotes education, science and culture but does not name elements. Option C, the International Science Council, brings scientific bodies together for policy and cooperation and has no naming power. Option D, the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, works on the study of the earth, its shape, gravity and interior, and so is unrelated to chemical names, although its own abbreviation looks similar.