Match List-I with List-II and choose the correct answer using the codes given below the lists :
List-I (Person)
A. Gopi Thotakura
B. Dipa Karmakar
C. Aroh Barjatya
D. Dev Patel
List-II (Reason)
1. Fir

Question

Match List-I with List-II and choose the correct answer using the codes given below the lists :
List-I (Person)
A. Gopi Thotakura
B. Dipa Karmakar
C. Aroh Barjatya
D. Dev Patel
List-II (Reason)
1. First Indian Gymnast to win Gold at Asian Championship
2. Indian born NASA scientist who led the team to study solar ecliptic impact on ionosphere
3. First Indian Space Tourist
4. British actor who made his directorial debut with thriller "Monkey Man"
Codes :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, A-3, B-1, C-2, D-4. Every pair is a 2024 news item and every pair checks out. A-3: Gopichand "Gopi" Thotakura, an Andhra-born pilot and entrepreneur, flew on Blue Origin's New Shepard NS-25 suborbital mission on 19 May 2024 and became the first Indian space tourist — and only the second Indian citizen in space after Rakesh Sharma's Soyuz flight of 1984, the difference being that Sharma was a serving Air Force officer on a state mission while Thotakura bought a seat on a commercial suborbital hop. B-1: Dipa Karmakar won gold in the women's vault at the Asian Gymnastics Championships in Tashkent in May 2024, the first gold by an Indian gymnast at that championship; she had already been the first Indian female gymnast to compete at an Olympics, finishing fourth in the vault at Rio 2016, and she retired in October 2024. C-2: Aroh Barjatya, an Indian-American physicist who directs the Space and Atmospheric Instrumentation Lab at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, led NASA's APEP mission — Atmospheric Perturbations around Eclipse Path — which fired three Black Brant IX sounding rockets from Wallops during the total solar eclipse of 8 April 2024 to measure how the sudden loss of sunlight disturbs the ionosphere. That is exactly what List-II item 2 is describing in its clumsy phrase "solar ecliptic impact on ionosphere". D-4: Dev Patel, the British actor, made his directorial debut with the action thriller Monkey Man, which he also produced and co-wrote; it premiered at South by Southwest on 11 March 2024 and released theatrically on 5 April 2024. A-3, B-1, C-2, D-4 is the code in option (b).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Wrong. It gets B and C right but swaps A and D, making Gopi Thotakura the British director of Monkey Man and Dev Patel the first Indian space tourist. List-II item 4 explicitly says 'British actor', which rules out Thotakura, and Dev Patel has never flown to space.  (c) Wrong. It fixes A and D correctly but swaps B and C, making Dipa Karmakar the NASA scientist studying the ionosphere and Aroh Barjatya the gymnast. Karmakar is India's best-known artistic gymnast, not a physicist, and Barjatya is a space-physics researcher at Embry-Riddle who led the APEP eclipse rockets.  (d) Wrong, and this is the sharpest trap in the set because the confusion it invites is real. It swaps A and C, making Thotakura the NASA scientist and Barjatya the space tourist. Both men genuinely have an Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University connection — Thotakura trained there as a pilot, Barjatya teaches and runs a lab there — so a candidate who has half-remembered 'Embry-Riddle' from the news can attach it to the wrong man. Separate them by role: Thotakura was a paying passenger on a Blue Origin suborbital flight, Barjatya was the principal investigator of a NASA sounding-rocket campaign.

Concept: This is a personalities-in-the-news match item, the format UPPSC uses most often for its current-affairs block, and every one of the four entries belongs to the first half of 2024 — the window the December 2024 paper was drawing from. Two of them turn on a 'first': the first Indian to fly as a paying space passenger, and the first Indian gymnast to take gold at the Asian Gymnastics Championships. The other two turn on identifying a person by profession: an Indian-origin space physicist leading a NASA mission, and a British actor of Indian descent turning director.

State PCS 2024 Q53 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q53 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer