In the context of sports, which of the following pairs are correctly matched?
1. Flushing Meadows : French Open
2. Venus Rosewater Dish : Wimbledon Trophy (Women)
3. Roland Garros : US Open
4. Austral

Question

In the context of sports, which of the following pairs are correctly matched?
1. Flushing Meadows : French Open
2. Venus Rosewater Dish : Wimbledon Trophy (Women)
3. Roland Garros : US Open
4. Australian Open (Women) : Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup
Select the correct answer using the codes given below.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, 2 and 4. Test the four pairs one by one and the structure of the question gives itself away. Pair 1, Flushing Meadows : French Open, is wrong. Flushing Meadows is in New York — the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center stands inside Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in the borough of Queens, and it has been the home of the US Open since 1978. Its main court, the Arthur Ashe Stadium, seats about 23,200 and is the largest tennis stadium in the world; the courts are hard courts, acrylic over concrete. Pair 3, Roland Garros : US Open, is wrong for the mirror-image reason. Stade Roland Garros in Paris was built in 1928 so that France could defend the Davis Cup at home, and it is named after Roland Garros (1888–1918), the pioneering French aviator, not after a tennis player. It hosts the French Open, played on red clay in late May and early June, and the tournament is so completely identified with the ground that it is now officially called Roland-Garros. The setter has simply swapped the two venues between statements 1 and 3, which is the key to the whole item. Pair 2, Venus Rosewater Dish : Wimbledon Trophy (Women), is correct. The Venus Rosewater Dish is the trophy presented to the Wimbledon ladies' singles champion, and it is a partially gilded sterling silver salver about 18¾ inches (47.6 cm) across, made in 1864 by Elkington & Co. of Birmingham and first presented in 1886 to Blanche Bingley. Its decoration has nothing to do with tennis: the central boss shows Sophrosyne, the personification of temperance — not Venus, despite the name — and the rim shows Minerva presiding over the seven liberal arts. The champion holds it for the photographs and keeps a three-quarter-size replica; the dish itself stays in the All England Club museum. Pair 4, Australian Open (Women) : Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup, is also correct. The Australian Open women's singles trophy has been named the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup since 1934, in memory of Daphne Akhurst Cozens (22 April 1903 – 9 January 1933), who won the Australian singles title five times — 1925, 1926, 1928, 1929 and 1930 — and died at twenty-nine. The men's champion at Melbourne receives the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup. Only pairs 2 and 4 stand, which is option (d).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Right about the Venus Rosewater Dish and wrong about the venue. It accepts Flushing Meadows as the home of the French Open, when Flushing Meadows is a park in Queens, New York and hosts the US Open on hard courts; the French Open is played on the clay of Stade Roland Garros in Paris. A candidate who has heard both names without attaching either to a city is exactly who this option is written for.  (b) Again correct on the Wimbledon trophy, and again taken in by the venue swap — this time in the other direction, accepting Roland Garros as the home of the US Open. Roland Garros is the Paris clay-court complex that gives the French Open its official name. Note that (a) and (b) fail on opposite halves of the same swap, so a candidate who knows the location of either venue can strike both options at once.  (c) Correctly pairs the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup with the Australian Open women's singles but keeps statement 3, Roland Garros : US Open, which is false. This is the most instructive wrong answer on the question: it shows that knowing the trophies is not enough, because two of the four statements test venues and the venues are the ones that have been tampered with.

Concept: The four Grand Slam or major championships are, in the order they are played each year, the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open. Each has a fixed home, a fixed surface and, in three cases, named singles trophies, and BPSC and UPSC both mine that grid for pairs. The Australian Open is played at Melbourne Park in January on hard courts; its women's champion receives the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup and its men's champion the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup, both named for Australian players of the inter-war years. The French Open is played at Stade Roland Garros in Paris in late May and early June on crushed-brick red clay, the slowest of the surfaces; the trophies are the Coupe Suzanne Lenglen for the women and the Coupe des Mousquetaires for the men. Wimbledon, at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in south-west London, is the oldest tennis tournament in the world, first held in 1877, and the only major still played on grass; the ladies' champion receives the Venus Rosewater Dish and the gentlemen's champion a silver-gilt cup. The US Open, at Flushing Meadows in New York from late August into September, is played on hard courts and is the one major whose singles trophies carry no personal name. Two conventions explain most of the confusion candidates have here. The venues are named after places or people connected with the ground — Roland Garros the aviator, Wimbledon the district, Flushing Meadows the park — while the trophies are named after champions or after the object itself. And 'winning the Grand Slam', strictly used, means taking all four titles in the same calendar year, not merely holding four majors at once.

State PCS 2023 Q44 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q44 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer