MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 90 of 100

Correct — option (1), 'Only (a), (b)'. Only three statements are printed here, (a) to (c), so the whole question turns on which one of them fails. Statement (a) is correct: the Nobel Peace Prize for 2023 was awarded to Narges Mohammadi, the Iranian human rights campaigner, by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Statement (b) is correct and is close to the official language of the award, which honoured her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all — she is precisely a champion of equality and of women's rights, and the citation was read against the background of the 'Woman, Life, Freedom' protests that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022. Statement (c) is the one that fails, and it fails on its year. The Defenders of Human Rights Center was founded in Tehran in 2001 by Shirin Ebadi together with several other lawyers, and Narges Mohammadi joined it in 2003, later becoming its vice-president. The statement dates her joining to 2004. Everything else in the sentence is right — the organisation, the founder, her association with it — which is what makes the single wrong digit so easy to miss. Note also that the paper prints the body's name as 'Defenders of Human Right Center', with a singular 'Right'; the organisation's name uses the plural. She was imprisoned in Iran when the award was announced and remained so at the ceremony in Oslo.

• (2)Only (b), (c) — This option keeps the misdated statement (c) and discards statement (a), the single most secure fact in the set — that the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize went to Narges Mohammadi. A candidate reaches this combination by doubting the laureate rather than the date, usually because Shirin Ebadi's name appears in statement (c) and Ebadi is herself a Nobel Peace laureate, of 2003. Two Iranian women, two Nobel Peace Prizes, twenty years apart, and one of them founded the organisation the other joined: the overlap is exactly what the option is built on.
• (3)Only (a), (c) — This option gets the laureate right but pairs it with the misdated statement while rejecting statement (b), which is a fair summary of the citation itself. The Norwegian Nobel Committee's stated ground for the award was her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her advocacy of human rights and freedom for all, so describing her as a champion of equality and women's rights is not an embellishment but the substance of the prize. Rejecting a statement because it sounds like a general characterisation rather than a hard fact is a common error on this format.
• (4)All of the above — 'All of the above' requires every printed statement to be true, and statement (c) is not: she joined the Defenders of Human Rights Center in 2003, not 2004, and the centre itself was founded in 2001. An escape option of this kind is worth taking only after each statement has been positively confirmed, and a statement carrying a specific year should always be the last one a candidate accepts, because a shifted year is the cheapest false statement an examiner can write and the hardest to notice.

Narges Mohammadi, born in Zanjan in 1972 and trained as a physicist, moved from engineering into journalism and human rights advocacy in Iran, campaigning against the death penalty and against the treatment of women prisoners. She joined the Defenders of Human Rights Center — founded in Tehran in 2001 by Shirin Ebadi and other lawyers — in 2003, and rose to be its vice-president. She has been arrested repeatedly and has spent long periods in Evin prison, and it was from prison that she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2023. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which alone among the Nobel committees sits in Norway rather than Sweden, cited her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her promotion of human rights and freedom for all, and explicitly linked the award to the 'Woman, Life, Freedom' movement. The connection to Shirin Ebadi is worth holding: Ebadi received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to do so, and it is her organisation that Mohammadi joined that same year.

Nobel Prize questions are annual fixtures in Indian state services and they are asked in two forms — who won a named prize in a named year, and a statement list of this kind in which the laureate is correct and one supporting detail has been altered. MPSC's alteration here is a single digit in a year, applied to a subsidiary biographical fact rather than to the award itself, so a candidate who knows only the headline cannot separate the true statements from the false one. The preparation that works is to record, for each Peace Prize of the current cycle, the laureate, the country, the official ground of the award in the committee's own words, and one institutional affiliation. It is also worth noticing what this question does NOT depend on: it prints only three statements, so a candidate expecting a fourth and hunting for it wastes time, and the escape option 'all of the above' is available and wrong. Reading how many statements are actually printed is the first step on every list question in this paper, because the count varies from two to six.

• The Nobel Peace Prize for 2023 was awarded to Narges Mohammadi of Iran by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
• The citation honoured her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all.
• The Defenders of Human Rights Center was founded in Tehran in 2001 by Shirin Ebadi with other lawyers; Narges Mohammadi joined it in 2003 and became its vice-president.
• Shirin Ebadi was herself awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, the first Iranian and first Muslim woman to receive it.
• Narges Mohammadi was born in Zanjan, Iran, in 1972 and trained as a physicist before moving to journalism and human rights work.
• She was imprisoned in Iran when the 2023 prize was announced and could not attend the ceremony in Oslo.

• Accepting a statement because the organisation and the person in it are correct, when the year attached to them has been shifted
• Confusing Narges Mohammadi with Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 laureate who founded the organisation she joined
• Assuming four statements are printed when only three are, and searching for a statement that does not exist
• Taking 'all of the above' as the safe answer on a three-statement list without testing each statement

The Nobel Prizes are asked every year in MPSC current-affairs sections, most often as direct recall of the Peace and Literature laureates, and sometimes as a statement list combining the laureate with a biographical detail. The falsified element is typically a date, an organisation or a nationality. Keep a one-page record of each year's laureates with the committee's stated reason, since that wording is what the 'champion of' style statements are drawn from.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by a committee appointed in which country ?

  • (a)Sweden
  • (b)Norway
  • (c)Denmark
  • (d)Switzerland

  Answer(b) Norway — the Peace Prize alone is awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee and presented in Oslo, while the prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and economic sciences are awarded by Swedish institutions and presented in Stockholm.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Shirin Ebadi, the founder of the Defenders of Human Rights Center in Tehran, received the Nobel Peace Prize in which year ?

  • (a)2001
  • (b)2003
  • (c)2011
  • (d)2023

  Answer(b) 2003 — Shirin Ebadi was the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The 2023 prize went to Narges Mohammadi, who joined Ebadi's organisation in 2003 and later became its vice-president.