Match the pairs : (Nobel Prize, 2025)
'A'
(a) Discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit
(b) The development of metal-organic frameworks
(c) D

Question

Match the pairs : (Nobel Prize, 2025)
'A'
(a) Discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit
(b) The development of metal-organic frameworks
(c) Discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance
(d) Promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela
'B'
(i) Maria Carina Machado
(ii) Fred Ramsdell
(iii) Richard Robson
(iv) John Clarke

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), '(a)-(iv), (b)-(iii), (c)-(ii), (d)-(i)'. Column A reproduces four of the 2025 Nobel citations almost word for word, and column B names one laureate from each. Item (a) is the Nobel Prize in Physics 2025, awarded for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit. It was shared by John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis for experiments showing that quantum behaviour — tunnelling through a barrier, and energy taking only discrete values — could be made to appear in an electrical circuit large enough to hold in the hand, work that underlies today's superconducting quantum bits. So (a) pairs with (iv), John Clarke. Item (b) is the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025, for the development of metal-organic frameworks, shared by Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi. So (b) pairs with (iii), Richard Robson. Item (c) is the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025, for discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance, shared by Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi. So (c) pairs with (ii), Fred Ramsdell. Item (d) is the Nobel Peace Prize 2025, awarded to the Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado for her work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle towards a just and peaceful transition. So (d) pairs with (i). The efficient route through this question is the Peace Prize. Look down the option column at what each choice does with item (d): option (1) gives it John Clarke, option (3) and option (4) both give it Richard Robson, and only option (2) gives it Machado. So a candidate who knows only the Peace Prize — the one award that reaches the general news everywhere — can key the question without touching the three science citations. A second confirmation is available on item (c): only options (1) and (2) pair peripheral immune tolerance with Fred Ramsdell, and option (1) has already failed on (d). One printing note: the paper sets the Peace laureate's name as 'Maria Carina Machado'. The laureate is Maria Corina Machado. The name is close enough that no candidate would be misled about who is meant, and the pairing is unaffected.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This gets the chemistry and medicine rows right but swaps the two ends: it credits the physics discovery of macroscopic quantum tunnelling to Maria Corina Machado and the Venezuelan democracy citation to John Clarke. It is the option for a candidate who has learnt the science pairings and then attached the remaining two names in the order they happened to appear, without checking that a Peace citation cannot belong to a physicist.  (c) The physics row is right — John Clarke for the electric-circuit tunnelling work — but the other three are rotated. Metal-organic frameworks are credited to Fred Ramsdell, who is an immunologist; peripheral immune tolerance to Maria Corina Machado, who is a politician; and the Venezuelan democracy citation to Richard Robson, a chemist. One correct pair out of four is exactly what a partial recollection produces.  (d) Every pair here is wrong. Machado gets the physics citation, Ramsdell the chemistry citation, Clarke the immunology citation and Robson the Peace citation. This is the option that survives if a candidate recognises all four names as 2025 laureates but has attached none of them to a discipline — which is why the useful unit of revision is not the list of names but the pairing of each name to its field.

Concept: The 2025 Nobel Prizes divided as follows. In Physiology or Medicine, Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi were recognised for discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance — the mechanism by which the immune system, having already been trained in the thymus, is restrained in the rest of the body from attacking the organism's own tissues; the work centres on regulatory T cells and the gene that controls their development, and it opened a route to understanding autoimmune disease and transplant rejection. In Physics, John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis were recognised for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit, demonstrating that effects normally confined to single particles can be produced in a circuit of everyday size — the physical basis of superconducting quantum computing. In Chemistry, Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi were recognised for the development of metal-organic frameworks, crystalline materials in which metal centres are joined by organic linkers to leave enormous internal void space, with applications in gas storage and separation, catalysis, carbon capture and harvesting water from dry air. The Peace Prize went to Maria Corina Machado of Venezuela.

State PCS 2026 Q89 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q89 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer