Who was the first person to be awarded the Nobel Prize twice?

The correct answer is B, Yuri Gagarin. The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched aboard Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961 and completed a single orbit of the Earth, becoming the first human being in space. The day is now marked every year as the anniversary of human spaceflight.

Option A, Alexei Leonov, was also a Soviet cosmonaut, but his own first came four years later, in March 1965, when he stepped out of Voskhod 2 and made the first spacewalk. Option C, Neil Armstrong, was the first person to set foot on the Moon, in July 1969, which is a different first and the commonest confusion in this question. Option D, Rakesh Sharma, was the first Indian in space, in 1984 aboard a Soviet mission, and he is offered whenever the paper wants to see if the candidate has read the words in the world rather than in India.

The correct answer is C, Valentina Tereshkova. The Soviet cosmonaut flew alone aboard Vostok 6 in June 1963 and spent nearly three days in orbit, becoming the first woman in space, two years after Yuri Gagarin's flight.

Option A, Svetlana Savitskaya, was the second woman in space and, in 1984, the first woman to walk in space, so she answers a neighbouring question rather than this one. Option B, Sally Ride, was the first American woman in space, in 1983, and the trap works only if the candidate reads American for world. Option D, Kalpana Chawla, was the first woman of Indian origin to go into space, flying with NASA in 1997 and dying in the Columbia accident of 2003. Fix the pair as Gagarin for the first man and Tereshkova for the first woman, both of the Soviet Union.

The correct answer is D, Neil Armstrong. The American astronaut commanded the Apollo 11 mission and stepped out of the lunar module on 20 July 1969, becoming the first human being to walk on the Moon.

Option B, Edwin Buzz Aldrin, followed him out of the same module minutes later and was therefore the second person on the Moon, which is exactly the swap the paper setter is testing. Option A, Michael Collins, was the third member of Apollo 11, but he remained in the command module in lunar orbit and never landed. Option C, Yuri Gagarin, was the first human in space in 1961, a Soviet first that belongs to a different question and to a different country; he never travelled to the Moon. Remember the order for Apollo 11 as Armstrong, then Aldrin, with Collins in orbit.

The correct answer is A, Roald Amundsen. The Norwegian explorer and his party reached the South Pole in December 1911, using dog sledges and a carefully laid line of supply depots, and returned safely.

Option B, Robert Falcon Scott, led the British party that reached the same point about a month later, in January 1912, only to find Amundsen's tent already there; Scott and his companions died on the return journey, and he is the standard distractor because the race between the two is so well known. Option C, Robert Peary, belongs to the other end of the Earth, being credited in most examination lists with reaching the North Pole in 1909. Option D, Ernest Shackleton, led famous Antarctic expeditions, including the Endurance voyage, but never stood at the Pole itself.

The correct answer is C, New Zealand. In 1893 New Zealand, then a self-governing colony, gave women the right to vote in national elections, the first country in the world to do so, after a long campaign led by Kate Sheppard.

Option D, Australia, followed within a decade and is the closest distractor, but its franchise came later and did not extend to all women at once. Option B, the United Kingdom, gave the vote to some women only in 1918 and on equal terms with men in 1928. Option A, the United States, extended the vote to women through the nineteenth amendment to its constitution in 1920. The order to remember is New Zealand first, then Australia, with Britain and the United States after the First World War.