Which country hosted the 2022 Winter Olympics ?

Question

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Correct — D, China. The XXIV Olympic Winter Games, branded Beijing 2022, were held from 4 to 20 February 2022, with competition in some events beginning on 2 February. The venues were spread across three clusters — the city of Beijing itself, the suburban Yanqing District for the sliding and alpine events, and Zhangjiakou in Hebei for most snow events — and several 2008 buildings were reused, the Beijing National Stadium for the ceremonies and the Beijing National Aquatics Centre, the 'Water Cube' turned 'Ice Cube', for curling. Beijing had been selected on 31 July 2015 at the 128th IOC Session in Kuala Lumpur, beating Almaty, and with these Games it became the FIRST CITY ever to host both a Summer Olympics, in 2008, and a Winter Olympics. The Games ran under the motto 'Together for a Shared Future' and featured a record 109 medal events across 7 sports and 15 disciplines, with 2,880 athletes from 91 teams; Haiti and Saudi Arabia made their Winter Olympic debuts. Norway topped the medal table for the third consecutive Winter Games with 37 medals including 16 golds, the most golds ever won at a single Winter Olympics; the host nation finished fourth on golds with nine, its best Winter performance. India's contingent was a single athlete, the alpine skier Arif Khan, who carried the flag at the opening ceremony, and India's eleventh Winter Olympic appearance again ended without a medal. India also announced a diplomatic boycott of the ceremonies in February 2022 after China chose Qi Fabao, a soldier involved in the 2020 border clashes, as a torchbearer.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) A two-time Winter Olympic host, but not in 2022. Canada staged the Games at Calgary in 1988 and at Vancouver in 2010. Its Beijing 2022 story was a poor one by its own standards — 26 medals of which only four were gold, leaving it outside the top ten of the medal table for the first time since 1988.  (b) Japan has twice hosted the Winter Games, at Sapporo in 1972 and Nagano in 1998, and it hosted the Tokyo Summer Olympics in 2021 after that edition's own pandemic postponement. The Tokyo Games finishing barely six months before Beijing 2022 is what makes this option feel recent, but Tokyo was a Summer Olympics and a different host country.  (c) The immediately preceding host, which is what makes this the strongest decoy. PyeongChang staged the 2018 Winter Olympics, four years before Beijing, and the two together with Tokyo 2020 formed an unusual run of three consecutive Games in East Asia. One edition too early.

Concept: The Winter Olympic Games have been held since Chamonix in 1924 and, since the Lillehammer Games of 1994, run on a four-year cycle offset by two years from the Summer Games. That offset is the reason a candidate must always check which set of Games a question is asking about: 2018 PyeongChang and 2022 Beijing are Winter editions, while 2016 Rio, 2020 Tokyo held in 2021 and 2024 Paris are Summer. The Winter programme is far smaller than the Summer one — seven sports at Beijing 2022, against thirty-two at Tokyo — because every event must be held on snow or ice, and the hosts are correspondingly concentrated in Europe, North America and East Asia. Awarding a Winter Games to Beijing, a city with very little natural snowfall, meant almost the entire snow competition was run on artificial snow, which became one of the recurring criticisms of the edition alongside the human-rights objections that produced diplomatic boycotts by several Western governments.

State PCS 2025 Q49 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q49 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer