Who was the first woman judge of the Supreme Court of India?

The correct answer is B, Dr. Rajendra Prasad. He had presided over the Constituent Assembly that framed the Constitution and became the first President when the Constitution came into force in 1950. He remains the only person to have served two full terms in the office.

Option A, Jawaharlal Nehru, was the first Prime Minister and never held the presidency, and the two offices are the commonest pair to be swapped in this question. Option C, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, was the first Vice-President and became the second President only after Rajendra Prasad. Option D, Dr. Zakir Husain, was the third President, and he carries two firsts of his own that papers like to ask: he was the first Muslim President of India and the first President to die while in office. Keep the sequence of the first three Presidents in mind and none of these can confuse you.

The correct answer is C, Rabindranath Tagore. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for Gitanjali and was the first Asian of any nationality to win a Nobel Prize, which is a second fact worth carrying.

Option A, C. V. Raman, is the answer to a closely related question: he was the first Indian to win a Nobel Prize in a science, taking the Physics prize in 1930 for the scattering of light now named the Raman effect. Option B, Mother Teresa, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 as an Indian citizen, and is therefore the first answer to the question about the Peace Prize, not the first overall. Option D, Amartya Sen, won the prize in Economic Sciences in 1998, decades after Tagore. Read the stem carefully, because the examiner separates first Indian, first in a science and first in peace.

The correct answer is A, Rakesh Sharma. The Indian Air Force pilot flew aboard the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz T-11 in 1984 under a joint programme and spent about a week on the Salyut 7 space station, becoming the first Indian citizen in space.

Option B, Kalpana Chawla, was the first woman of Indian origin to go into space, flying with NASA in 1997, which is a different first and the commonest distractor here. Option C, Ravish Malhotra, was the back-up cosmonaut for the same 1984 mission and trained alongside Rakesh Sharma but did not fly, so he is placed in the options to catch a half-remembered fact. Option D, Sunita Williams, is an American astronaut of Indian origin known for her long-duration stays aboard the International Space Station. Read whether the stem asks for an Indian citizen or a person of Indian origin.

The correct answer is C, Indira Gandhi, who became Prime Minister in 1966 and was also the first woman to receive the Bharat Ratna, in 1971. Both facts are set from this chapter.

Option A, Pratibha Devisingh Patil, was the first woman President of India, taking office in 2007, and the President and the Prime Minister are the pair most often swapped in this question. Option B, Sarojini Naidu, was the first woman Governor of an Indian state, of Uttar Pradesh, and the first Indian woman to preside over the Indian National Congress, at Kanpur in 1925. Option D, Sucheta Kripalani, was the first woman Chief Minister of an Indian state, also of Uttar Pradesh. All four women hold a first of some kind, which is exactly why the examiner groups them; attach each name to its own office.

The correct answer is A, Major Somnath Sharma. He was decorated after his death for the action at Badgam in which his company held back the advance on the Srinagar airfield in November 1947, and his is the first name on the roll of the Param Vir Chakra.

Option B, Naik Jadunath Singh, also received the award for action in the same operations of 1947 and 1948, but later than Somnath Sharma, which makes him the trap in this question. Option C, Captain Vikram Batra, received the award after his death for the Kargil operations of 1999. Option D, Abdul Hamid, received it for destroying enemy tanks in the war of 1965. Remember the separate peacetime award as well: the Ashoka Chakra, whose first woman recipient was Neerja Bhanot.