MPSC 2025 Prelims Paper-I · Question 88 of 100

Correct — option (3), 'Only A, C'. Statement A is accurate: Gukesh D. won the FIDE World Chess Championship 2024, held in Singapore from late November into December 2024, defeating the defending champion Ding Liren of China in the final game to become, at eighteen, the youngest ever undisputed World Chess Champion. Statement C is also accurate: at the 45th FIDE Chess Olympiad, held in Budapest, Hungary, in September 2024, Gukesh played first board for India's Open team and earned an individual gold medal for his board-one performance, in addition to India's team result. Statement B is the one that fails, and it fails on a single, precise detail — the venue. The 45th Chess Olympiad's Open team event, in which India won the gold medal, was held in Budapest, Hungary, not in Singapore. Singapore is where the separate World Chess Championship match took place a few months later; Budapest is where the Olympiad, a country-versus-country team event with its own individual board prizes, was held. Because statement B places the Olympiad in the wrong city, it is false, and only A and C, which correctly separate the two events and their two venues, survive together.

• (1)Only A, B — Keeps the World Championship statement, which is correct, but also credits the Olympiad team statement with the wrong venue. The 45th Chess Olympiad's Open team event was held in Budapest, not Singapore — Singapore hosted the separate World Chess Championship match later in the year.
• (2)Only B, C — Correctly keeps the Olympiad individual-gold statement, which is accurately located at Budapest, but also credits the Olympiad team statement with the wrong venue, Singapore, and drops the World Championship statement, which is correct as printed.
• (4)All of the above — Requires the Olympiad team statement to be true alongside the other two, but it places the 45th Chess Olympiad in Singapore when the event was actually held in Budapest, Hungary. Two of the three statements share the correct facts about Gukesh's achievements; the third misplaces the venue of a real event rather than describing a fictitious one, which is what makes it a plausible-looking error.

2024 was the year Gukesh D. established himself at the top of world chess through two distinct events that this question is built to keep separate. The 45th FIDE Chess Olympiad, a biennial team tournament in which national squads compete board by board, was held in Budapest, Hungary, in September 2024; India's Open team, with Gukesh on board one, won the gold medal, and Gukesh separately earned an individual gold for his own board-one performance. Later that year, the FIDE World Chess Championship 2024 — a one-on-one match for the individual world title, unconnected to the Olympiad's team format — was held in Singapore, where Gukesh defeated the reigning champion Ding Liren to become, at eighteen, the youngest undisputed World Chess Champion in history.

MPSC and UPSC both like sports current-affairs questions that separate a team event from an individual title won by the same athlete in the same year, because the two are easy to conflate when a candidate remembers 'Gukesh won gold in 2024' without holding the specific tournament, format and city for each achievement. The reliable habit is to keep the Olympiad (Budapest, team event, biennial) and the World Championship (Singapore, individual match, that specific cycle) as two separate facts rather than one blended memory of 'Gukesh's 2024 gold medals'.

• The 45th FIDE Chess Olympiad was held in Budapest, Hungary, in September 2024; India's Open team, led on board one by Gukesh D., won the gold medal, and India's Women's team also won gold.
• Gukesh D. additionally won an individual gold medal for his board-one performance at the 45th Chess Olympiad in Budapest.
• The FIDE World Chess Championship 2024 was held in Singapore, where Gukesh D. defeated the defending champion Ding Liren of China to win the title.
• Gukesh D., born in 2006, became the youngest ever undisputed World Chess Champion at eighteen years of age.
• The Chess Olympiad is a biennial team event organised by FIDE, distinct in format, frequency and purpose from the World Chess Championship, which is a periodic one-on-one match for the individual world title.

• Merging two real events that happened to the same athlete in the same year — the Chess Olympiad (Budapest, team) and the World Chess Championship (Singapore, individual) — into a single blended memory
• Assuming a statement is false because it names an unfamiliar city, when Budapest genuinely is the correct venue for the 45th Chess Olympiad
• Overlooking that a statement can be wrong purely on a location detail while every other fact in it — the medal, the event name, the year — is accurate, which is exactly how statement B is constructed here

MPSC and UPSC both favour recent sports achievements as current-affairs material, and a common construction pairs several true statements about one athlete with one statement that is almost entirely accurate except for a single swapped detail — typically a city, a year, or a discipline. The defence is to hold each achievement as a complete unit — event name, format, city, year — rather than as a loose collection of facts that can be recombined, since the wrong option is usually built by taking two true facts from different events and stitching them together.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The 45th FIDE Chess Olympiad, at which India's Open team won the gold medal, was held in which city in 2024 ?

  • (a)Singapore
  • (b)Budapest
  • (c)Chennai
  • (d)Baku

  Answer(b) Budapest — the 45th Chess Olympiad was held in Budapest, Hungary, in September 2024. Singapore is where the separate FIDE World Chess Championship match, won individually by Gukesh D., was held later that year.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Gukesh D. became the youngest ever undisputed World Chess Champion by defeating which player in the FIDE World Chess Championship 2024 ?

  • (a)Magnus Carlsen
  • (b)Ding Liren
  • (c)Ian Nepomniachtchi
  • (d)Viswanathan Anand

  Answer(b) Ding Liren — the defending champion, whom Gukesh D. defeated in Singapore to win the title at eighteen years of age. Magnus Carlsen had earlier declined to defend his title, which opened the path to the match between Ding Liren and Gukesh.