Sport: Reporting Rules, Terminology and Fair Play
Sport questions combine rules knowledge with reporting conventions. You need a working grasp of how major sports are scored and structured - for example that a football match is two halves of 45 minutes plus stoppage time, that a cricket Test match can last five days, and that tennis uses sets and games with tie-breaks - plus the vocabulary of results, tables and fixtures. Understand the difference between a league (points over a season), a cup/knockout (elimination), and a tournament group stage.
Traps in this domain are usually precision traps. Watch for "won" vs "drew" (a draw gives each side a point in league football, not a win), "aggregate score" in two-legged ties (the combined score across both legs, with away-goals rules varying by competition), and "penalty shoot-out" (used to decide a knockout tie, not to change the match result for records in the same way). Another trap is confusing individual and team sports when describing achievement, or attributing a record to the wrong body (club vs national team).
Be careful with integrity and doping topics: questions expect you to know that anti-doping is governed by an independent authority and that "strict liability" means an athlete is responsible for what is in their body, even without intent.
Rule of thumb: if a question hinges on a number, re-read whether it asks for the match result or the tie result.
Worked example: Team A wins the home leg 2–1 and loses the away leg 1–0. The match results are a win and a loss, but the aggregate is 2–2. Whether that is a win for A depends on the competition's away-goals rule - so the safe answer names the aggregate and the rule rather than asserting a winner.