Match List – I with List – II and select the correct answer using the code given below the lists.
List – I (Pulitzer award categories)
A. Fiction
B. Music
C. Biography
D. Drama
List – II (Awardee in 2

Question

Match List – I with List – II and select the correct answer using the code given below the lists.
List – I (Pulitzer award categories)
A. Fiction
B. Music
C. Biography
D. Drama
List – II (Awardee in 2025)
1. Jason Roberts
2. Branden Jacobs Jenkins
3. Susie Ibarra
4. Percival Everett
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, A-4, B-3, C-1, D-2. The 2025 Pulitzer Prizes were announced on 5 May 2025, so they were the current set when this paper was sat on 12 October 2025. Taking the four categories in the order the list gives them: Fiction (A) went to Percival Everett for James (4), his retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the enslaved man Jim, a novel that had already taken the National Book Award for Fiction in 2024. Music (B) went to the percussionist and composer Susie Ibarra for Sky Islands (3). Biography (C) went to Jason Roberts for Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life (1), his double portrait of Linnaeus and Buffon and their rival attempts to catalogue the whole of nature. Drama (D) went to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins for Purpose (2). That gives A-4, B-3, C-1, D-2, which is option (c). Notice how the item is built: it is really two independent binary choices rather than one four-way puzzle. Either Everett is the novelist and Ibarra the composer, or they are swapped; and either Roberts is the biographer and Jacobs-Jenkins the dramatist, or they are swapped. Get both pairs the right way round and only one option survives.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This option gets both halves wrong at once. It makes Susie Ibarra the fiction winner and Percival Everett the music winner, and it makes Branden Jacobs-Jenkins the biographer and Jason Roberts the dramatist — a complete double inversion. Everett is a novelist, whose James won Fiction; Ibarra is a composer and percussionist, and Sky Islands is a musical work. This is the option marked by a candidate who recognises the four names as 2025 Pulitzer winners but has attached none of them to a category.  (b) Half right, and therefore the most tempting wrong answer on the page. Fiction to Everett and Music to Ibarra are both correct, but the second half is inverted: this option gives Biography to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Drama to Jason Roberts, when it is the other way round. Jacobs-Jenkins is a playwright and Purpose is a play, which took the 2025 Drama prize; Jason Roberts is a non-fiction writer and Every Living Thing is a biography of two eighteenth-century naturalists. If the two literary names are the ones you are unsure about, the tell is the form of the work — a play cannot win Biography.  (d) The mirror image of the previous option. The second half is correct — Biography to Jason Roberts and Drama to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins — but the first half is inverted, putting Susie Ibarra in Fiction and Percival Everett in Music. Everett is one of the most widely discussed American novelists of the decade, the author of James and of Erasure, and he has never been a composer; Ibarra's Sky Islands is a musical composition, not a novel. Anchoring each name to the form of the work it produced settles this half immediately.

Concept: The Pulitzer Prizes were established under the will of Joseph Pulitzer, the Hungarian-born American newspaper publisher who owned the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World, and have been awarded annually since 1917. They are administered by Columbia University in New York, which Pulitzer also endowed with its school of journalism. The prizes cover two broad domains: a large group of journalism categories, headed by the Public Service award that is given as a gold medal to a news organisation rather than to an individual, and a smaller group in letters, drama and music, which includes Fiction, Drama, History, Biography, Memoir or Autobiography, Poetry, General Nonfiction and Music. The winners are announced each spring, normally in early May.

State PCS 2025 Q139 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q139 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer