MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 95 of 100

Correct — option (3), which pairs a with iii, b with ii and c with i. This is a matching question with only THREE items in each column, not four, and the two columns are printed side by side purely as layout; their adjacency on the page asserts no pairing at all, and the pairing is entirely what the four options claim. Take the three names. Bhakti Kulkarni, item a, is a chess player, and chess is item iii — she was one of two chess players honoured with the Arjuna Award in 2022, the other being R. Praggnanandhaa. Sakshi Kumari, item b, is a kabaddi player, which is item ii. Lakshya Sen, item c, is a badminton player, item i, and the best known of the three: he won the men's singles gold at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham in 2022 and was part of the Indian team that won the Thomas Cup the same year, and he was one of two badminton players given the Arjuna Award in 2022 along with H. S. Prannoy. So the correct assignment is a-iii, b-ii, c-i, which is option (3). What makes this question far easier than it looks is the arithmetic of a three-by-three match. Because each sport can be used only once, a single confident pairing usually settles everything: Lakshya Sen is a badminton player, so c must be i, and option (3) is the only one of the four in which c is paired with i. The same is true from the other end — Bhakti Kulkarni is a chess player, so a must be iii, and again only option (3) says so. A candidate who recognises either of those two names does not need to know the third at all.

• (1)a - i, b - iii, c - ii — This option pairs a with i, b with iii and c with ii — Bhakti Kulkarni with badminton, Sakshi Kumari with chess and Lakshya Sen with kabaddi. Every one of the three is wrong, and the last of them is the giveaway: Lakshya Sen is one of India's leading badminton players, the Commonwealth Games men's singles champion of 2022 and a member of the Thomas Cup winning team of the same year, and pairing him with kabaddi cannot be right. In a three-item match an option that misassigns the most recognisable name can be struck out at once, without examining the other two pairs. It is worth noticing how such an option is constructed: it is a rotation of the correct assignment, in which each item is shifted to a neighbour's partner. Rotations look plausible because every sport is still used exactly once, and the only defence against them is to check at least one pair against knowledge rather than against the pattern.
• (2)a - ii, b - i, c - iii — This option pairs a with ii, b with i and c with iii — Bhakti Kulkarni with kabaddi, Sakshi Kumari with badminton and Lakshya Sen with chess. It fails on all three counts. Lakshya Sen with chess is the most easily dismissed, since he is a badminton player, and Bhakti Kulkarni with kabaddi is equally wrong, since she is a chess player. This is the other of the two rotations available in a three-item match, and like the first it preserves the bijection — every sport used once, every name assigned once — which is why it cannot be eliminated by any structural check. The lesson is that structure narrows a matching question but rarely finishes it: in a three-item match the structural constraint leaves six possible assignments and the paper offers four of them, so at least one real pairing has to be known. Here two of the three names are well within the reach of a candidate who followed the 2022 sports awards.
• (4)a - i, b - ii, c - iii — This option pairs a with i, b with ii and c with iii — Bhakti Kulkarni with badminton, Sakshi Kumari with kabaddi and Lakshya Sen with chess. It is the most seductive of the three wrong options because it gets one pair right, Sakshi Kumari with kabaddi, and because it is the assignment that simply follows the printed order of the two columns, taking the first name with the first sport, the second with the second and the third with the third. That is exactly the reading a matching question is designed to punish. The columns are printed alongside one another because the reader has to match them, and the order in which the items happen to be typeset carries no information whatever; if it did, the question would answer itself. Since Lakshya Sen plays badminton and not chess, the option fails, and it fails again on Bhakti Kulkarni, who plays chess and not badminton.

The Arjuna Award, instituted in 1961, is conferred by the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports for consistently outstanding performance over four years, and it sits below the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna, which is the country's highest sporting honour, and alongside the Dronacharya Award for coaches and the Dhyan Chand Award for lifetime achievement. Twenty-five sportspersons received the Arjuna Award for 2022, across athletics, badminton, boxing, chess, hockey, judo, kabaddi, lawn bowls, mallakhamb, shooting, table tennis, weightlifting, wrestling, wushu and the parasports; the awards were announced in November 2022. The three names in this question are drawn from that list — Bhakti Kulkarni in chess, Sakshi Kumari in kabaddi and Lakshya Sen in badminton. The list is worth reading as a whole rather than as isolated names, because it is a map of where Indian sport was winning in that cycle: two chess players in the year of the Chennai Olympiad, two badminton players in the year of the Thomas Cup, two boxers, two wrestlers and a lawn bowls player after the Birmingham Commonwealth Games, and disciplines such as mallakhamb and wushu that rarely appear in the headlines.

Matching questions are set in every MPSC paper — there are four in this one — and they reward structural thinking before recall. Three things should be established before any pairing is attempted. First, how many items each column holds: this question has three and not four, and a candidate who argues about a fourth pair is arguing about something the paper never printed. Second, that the side-by-side printing is layout: the item opposite a name on the page is not its partner, and any option that simply follows the printed order should be treated with suspicion rather than favour. Third, that the assignment is a bijection, each item used exactly once, which is what makes a single known pair so powerful — here either Lakshya Sen or Bhakti Kulkarni, taken alone, identifies the answer uniquely among the four options offered. On the substance, national sports awards are a fixture of the current affairs block, and the Arjuna list in particular is long enough that no candidate remembers all of it; the efficient preparation is to learn the disciplines with more than one awardee in a given year and the names that were already famous, which is where the examiner draws from. Note that the paper's column head prints 'Arjun Award' where the award is usually written Arjuna.

• Bhakti Kulkarni received the Arjuna Award for 2022 in chess; R. Praggnanandhaa was the other chess player on the same list.
• Sakshi Kumari received the Arjuna Award for 2022 in kabaddi, the only kabaddi player on that year's list.
• Lakshya Sen received the Arjuna Award for 2022 in badminton, along with H. S. Prannoy; he won the men's singles gold at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham and was part of India's Thomas Cup winning team that year.
• Twenty-five sportspersons received the Arjuna Award for 2022, spanning athletics, badminton, boxing, chess, hockey, judo, kabaddi, lawn bowls, mallakhamb, shooting, table tennis, weightlifting, wrestling, wushu and the parasports.
• The Arjuna Award was instituted in 1961 and is given by the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports for consistently outstanding performance over four years; the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna is the higher honour, and the Dronacharya Award is for coaches.

• Reading the side-by-side printing of the two columns as though adjacency were the answer, which is the single commonest error in matching questions
• Arguing about a fourth pair in a question whose columns hold only three items each, which is a real hazard because most matching questions in this paper carry four and the eye supplies what it expects
• Testing an option by pattern rather than by knowledge, when every option in a three-item match uses each sport exactly once and so passes any structural check
• Overlooking that one confidently known pair identifies the answer uniquely, and attempting to recall all three names instead

MPSC sets matching questions on awards, appointments, dams and rivers, tribes and districts, books and authors, and organisations and headquarters, and the technique is the same in every case. Establish the number of items, note that adjacency in print is meaningless, then look for the one pair you are surest of and eliminate every option that contradicts it; in a three-item or four-item match this usually leaves a single survivor. National sports awards are examined most often through the Arjuna list, because it is long, is announced annually, and mixes household names with sportspersons from disciplines the general reader has never followed — which is exactly the mixture that separates a candidate who read the list from one who recognises a celebrity. Expect the wrong options to be rotations of the correct assignment, and expect one of them to follow the printed order of the columns.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Arjuna Award for 2022 was conferred on Lakshya Sen for his performance in which sport ?

  • (a)Badminton
  • (b)Chess
  • (c)Kabaddi
  • (d)Table tennis

  Answer(a) Badminton — Lakshya Sen won the men's singles gold at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham and was part of India's Thomas Cup winning team the same year, and he was one of two badminton players on the 2022 Arjuna list, the other being H. S. Prannoy. Chess, named in the second option, was the discipline of Bhakti Kulkarni and R. Praggnanandhaa on the same list.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Arjuna Award, instituted in 1961, is conferred for which of the following ?

  • (a)Lifetime contribution to sport by a veteran sportsperson
  • (b)Consistently outstanding performance by a sportsperson over four years
  • (c)Outstanding coaching that has produced international medallists
  • (d)The single most spectacular performance of the year by a sportsperson

  Answer(b) Consistently outstanding performance by a sportsperson over four years — that is the Arjuna Award's criterion, and it is what distinguishes it from the Dhyan Chand Award for lifetime achievement, named in the first option, and from the Dronacharya Award for coaches, named in the third. The Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna sits above all of them as the country's highest sporting honour.