Awards – MCQ – GK Questions

The three economists used colonial history as a natural experiment to show that institutional quality — not geography or culture — is the main driver of national wealth. Where colonisers settled in large numbers and built inclusive institutions, countries tended to prosper; where extractive institutions were established to concentrate wealth, those patterns persisted for generations after independence. Their book Why Nations Fail (2012) brought these ideas to a general audience.

Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun discovered microRNA while studying C. elegans roundworms in the early 1990s. They found that the lin-4 gene produces a short RNA molecule (not a protein) that switches off another gene by binding to its messenger RNA. This post-transcriptional regulation mechanism was later found to be universal across animals, including humans.

Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind developed AlphaFold, which in 2020 solved the protein folding problem — predicting how a protein's amino acid sequence folds into its specific 3D shape. This 50-year-old challenge had been tested in the CASP competition since 1994. AlphaFold 2 achieved experimental-grade accuracy at CASP14 and later deposited structures for over 200 million proteins in a public database.

Hopfield and Hinton won the 2024 Physics Nobel for the theoretical foundations of artificial neural networks — specifically the Hopfield network (associative memory model) and the Boltzmann machine (a learning algorithm). These tools underpin modern machine learning. Note: this is 2024 Physics — quantum computing was Physics 2025.

Han Kang is a South Korean author whose novels The Vegetarian and Human Acts brought her international recognition. The 2024 Nobel made her the first Korean writer of any nationality to receive the prize in Literature.

Nihon Hidankyo — a confederation of atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha) from Hiroshima and Nagasaki — won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize. Founded in 1956, the organisation has spent nearly seven decades giving personal testimony about the human consequences of nuclear weapons, contributing to the international norm against their use.

Sen's 1981 book Poverty and Famines examined historical famines in Bengal (1943), Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and the Sahel and found that food supplies had not necessarily collapsed during these events. People starved because they lost the entitlements — wages, property, purchasing power — that allowed them to access food that was physically present. This entitlement framework changed how economists and aid agencies approach famine prevention.

Gandhi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and 1948. He was assassinated on 30 January 1948 — just days before the prize committee met. The committee chose not to award the Peace Prize that year, citing lack of a suitable living candidate. In later years, the Nobel Committee published a reflection stating that Gandhi's exclusion was an omission they regretted.

Satyarthi founded Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save Childhood Movement) in 1980 to combat child labour in India. His organisation conducted raids to free children from bonded labour and helped draft the ILO's Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention (1999). He shared the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize with Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan.

Chandrasekhar moved to the United States as a young man and became a US citizen. He received the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics as an American, not an Indian citizen. The Indian-citizen laureates were Tagore, Raman, Mother Teresa, Amartya Sen, and Kailash Satyarthi.

C.V. Raman first documented the inelastic scattering of light (the Raman Effect) on 28 February 1928 at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Calcutta. India declared 28 February as National Science Day in 1987 to mark this discovery. Raman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930.

Tagore received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for Gitanjali — a collection of devotional poems he translated into English prose himself during a voyage to England in 1912. The Swedish Academy described the verse as profoundly sensitive and fresh. He was the first Asian person to win a Nobel Prize of any kind.

Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi won the 2025 Chemistry Nobel for developing metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) — porous molecular structures with enormous internal surface areas. One gram of MOF can have a surface area larger than a football field, making them valuable for gas storage, separation, and removing environmental pollutants.

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was established in 1968 by Sweden's central bank — 72 years after Nobel's death in 1896. The original five prizes (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace) date from 1901. This distinction is a common exam trap in "which is NOT original" questions.

Han Kang is a South Korean author. She won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life. Her internationally known works include The Vegetarian and Human Acts.

María Corina Machado of Venezuela won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her tireless work promoting democratic rights and for unifying a divided political opposition around the demand for free elections and a peaceful transition from authoritarian rule. The Norwegian Nobel Committee called her "one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times."

John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton won the 2024 Physics Nobel for discoveries that enabled machine learning through artificial neural networks. Hinton, sometimes called the "godfather of AI," left Google in 2023 to speak openly about the risks of the technology he helped create.

Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese organisation of atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha) from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize. Founded in 1956, they have spent nearly seven decades giving personal testimony about the devastation caused by nuclear weapons, contributing to the global nuclear taboo.

Cassandra Kulukundis won the inaugural Best Casting Oscar for One Battle After Another. The Academy had first announced this category in February 2024. It is the first new competitive Oscar category since Best Animated Feature was introduced in 2001.

Norway's Sentimental Value, directed by Joachim Trier, won the Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards. The film also received acting and other nominations that night.