Who won India's first Olympic medals, taking two silver medals at the Paris Games of 1900?

The correct answer is B, Amsterdam 1928. India sent a hockey team to the Olympic Games for the first time in 1928 and won the gold medal without conceding a single goal in the tournament, beginning a run of six successive hockey golds that ran through 1932, 1936, 1948, 1952 and 1956. Option A, Antwerp 1920, is the Games at which India first sent a team of athletes, but hockey was not part of that programme for India and no medal was won. Option C, Los Angeles 1932, and option D, Berlin 1936, were the second and third hockey golds, and 1936 is especially famous because Dhyan Chand captained the side. The examiner's trap is to offer 1920, the year of India's first team, in place of 1928, the year of India's first gold.

The correct answer is C, Abhinav Bindra. Bindra won the men's 10 metre air rifle shooting event at Beijing in 2008, and it remains India's first individual Olympic gold medal; he had already become a world champion in the same event in 2006. Option A, Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, won silver in double trap shooting at Athens in 2004, which was India's first individual Olympic silver, and he is the standard distractor because his medal also came in shooting. Option B, Sushil Kumar, won a wrestling bronze in 2008 and a silver in 2012, making him the first Indian with individual medals at two Games, but neither was gold. Option D, Neeraj Chopra, won gold in the javelin throw at Tokyo in 2020, India's first Olympic medal of any colour in athletics, but that came thirteen years after Bindra.

The correct answer is B, weightlifting. Malleswari won a bronze medal in the 69 kilogram weight class at Sydney in 2000 and so became the first Indian woman to win any Olympic medal, which is why she is remembered as the Iron Lady of Indian sport. Option A, athletics, is wrong: P. T. Usha came closest for an Indian woman in athletics when she missed a bronze at Los Angeles in 1984 by a hundredth of a second, and the first Indian woman to win an Olympic athletics medal did not precede Malleswari. Option C, shooting, gave India its first individual gold through Abhinav Bindra, a man, in 2008. Option D, badminton, produced Saina Nehwal's bronze in 2012 and P. V. Sindhu's silver in 2016, both after Malleswari. Remember the year 2000 with weightlifting and Sydney.

The correct answer is B, hockey. Dhyan Chand played in the Indian hockey teams that won Olympic gold in 1928, 1932 and 1936, captaining the side in Berlin, and his control of the ball earned him the title of the wizard or the magician of hockey. His birthday, 29 August, is observed every year as National Sports Day, the occasion on which the national sports awards are conferred, and the highest of those awards now carries his name as the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award. Option A, football, belongs to names such as Syed Abdul Rahim and Chuni Goswami. Option C, wrestling, is the sport of K. D. Jadhav and Sushil Kumar. Option D, cricket, has no connection with him. The chain to remember is Dhyan Chand, hockey, 29 August and National Sports Day.

The correct answer is B, Prakash Padukone. Padukone won the All England Open in 1980, the oldest and at that time the most prestigious badminton tournament in the world, and he was also the first Indian to be ranked world number one in the men's game. Option A, Pullela Gopichand, won the same title in 2001 and so became only the second Indian to do it, which makes him the commonest wrong answer here; he later coached Saina Nehwal and P. V. Sindhu. Option C, Nandu Natekar, was the pioneering Indian player of the nineteen fifties and the first Indian to win an international badminton title, but not the All England. Option D, Syed Modi, was a national champion of the nineteen eighties. Fix the order in memory: Natekar as the pioneer, Padukone in 1980 and Gopichand in 2001.