State Exams GK Questions 2026

The Booker Prize is a British literary award given each year to one novel. Until 2014 only writers from the Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe were eligible; since then any novel originally written in English and published in the United Kingdom may be considered, and the winner receives fifty thousand pounds.

The prize was begun in 1969 with the firm Booker McConnell as its sponsor, which is where the name comes from, and it is given each year for a work of fiction written in English.

He is a physician and researcher of Indian origin, and his book The Emperor of All Maladies is a history of cancer written for general readers.

Joseph Pulitzer died in 1911 and provided for the prizes in his will; the first awards were made in 1917 by Columbia University.

Joseph Pulitzer, the newspaper publisher who owned the New York World, left money in his will both for a school of journalism and for the prizes, and Columbia University in New York administers the awards on the advice of the Pulitzer Prize Board.

The description is used because the award honours a lifetime of selfless service in Asia, in fields such as government service, public service and community leadership, in the manner in which the Nobel Prizes honour service to humanity.

He received the award in 1958, in the very first year it was given, for community leadership, in recognition of the Bhoodan movement in which he walked from village to village asking landowners to give land to the landless.

The trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund of New York set up the award in 1957, the year in which President Ramon Magsaysay died, and the first awards were given in 1958.

Ramon Magsaysay was President of the Philippines and died in an aircraft crash in March 1957. The award was created in his memory later that year, and it is given at Manila, the Philippine capital, on 31 August, his birth anniversary.

Badminton had appeared earlier as a demonstration game, but medals were first awarded at Barcelona in 1992, in men’s and women’s singles and doubles; mixed doubles was added at Atlanta in 1996.

At the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games of 2018 she became the first Indian woman to win the singles gold in table tennis, beating Singapore’s Yu Mengyu in the final, and she also took team gold at the same Games.

He won the men’s singles title at the All England Open in 1980, the first Indian to do so in the oldest badminton tournament in the world, first held in 1899.

The Swaythling Cup, presented by Lady Swaythling, is the trophy of the men’s team event at the World Table Tennis Championships, held since the first championships of 1926.

The laws of table tennis fix the playing surface at 76 centimetres above the floor, with the table 2.74 metres long and 1.525 metres wide, and the net across the middle 15.25 centimetres high.

The International Table Tennis Federation enlarged the ball from 38 millimetres to 40 millimetres after the Sydney Olympics of 2000, so that the slower, more visible ball would make rallies easier to follow on television.

Since 2006 badminton has used rally point scoring, in which a point is won on every rally whoever served, a game runs to 21 points and a match is decided over the best of three games.

The badminton net sags very slightly at the middle, so the laws fix two heights: 1.524 metres at the centre of the court and 1.55 metres over the side lines, at the posts.

The Laws of Badminton require a feathered shuttle to carry sixteen feathers fixed in a cork base covered with thin leather, and the feathers, usually from the wing of a goose or a duck, must be of the same length in one shuttle.

Named after Sir George Thomas, an English player and administrator, it is the world men’s team championship in badminton and was first contested in 1948–49.

The Corbillon Cup is the trophy of the women’s team event at the World Table Tennis Championships, and its companion, the Swaythling Cup, is the men’s team trophy.