Q 01/05

Kalam placed ninth before a selection board with only eight openings, narrowly missing his dream of becoming what?

A) Fighter pilot

B) Airline pilot

C) Astronaut

D) Naval officer

Answer · why

A) Fighter pilot

A fighter pilot was his 'dearest dream': he came ninth of 25 candidates before the Indian Air Force board at Dehradun, where eight were taken, and wen...

Q 02/05

Kalam's SLV-3 rocket orbited which satellite in July 1980, India's first successful satellite launch from its own soil?

A) Aryabhata

B) Rohini

C) Bhaskara

D) INSAT-1A

Answer · why

B) Rohini

Rohini's launch put India among the few nations able to orbit their own satellites; just a year earlier the same rocket had failed on its maiden fligh...

Q 03/05

With cardiologist Bhupathiraju Somaraju, Kalam lent his name in 1998 to a low-cost version of which medical device?

A) A pacemaker

B) A cochlear implant

C) An insulin pump

D) A coronary stent

Answer · why

D) A coronary stent

A coronary stent called the Kalam-Raju stent came out of the pairing, and in 2012 the same duo designed a Kalam-Raju tablet computer for rural health ...

Q 04/05

In the 2012 Greatest Indian poll run by Outlook and CNN-IBN, Kalam finished second behind which figure?

A) B. R. Ambedkar

B) Jawaharlal Nehru

C) Sardar Patel

D) Rabindranath Tagore

Answer · why

A) B. R. Ambedkar

B. R. Ambedkar topped the poll, which deliberately left out the Mahatma because organisers felt nobody could come close to the Father of the Nation.

Q 05/05

In 2017 scientists named a bacterium Solibacillus kalamii after Kalam, having found it on air filters from where?

A) A Mars rover assembly clean room

B) Antarctic research huts

C) International Space Station

D) A deep-sea submersible

Answer · why

C) International Space Station

International Space Station filters that had spent 40 months aloft yielded the bug, though its discoverer was sure it was no alien: he reckoned it had...