Quiz 34

Question 1

Remains of Homo habilis, an early species of man whose name means handy man because it’s known to have used tools, were first discovered in the 1960s at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania by which married couple of palaeontologists?

Answer 1

Louis and Mary Leakey

Question 2

What is the longest river in Afghanistan, sharing its name with a province of that country?

Answer 2

Helmand

Question 3

Which well-known editor and publisher, whose twin brother was murdered by the IRA in 1975, had been the official timekeeper when Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in 1954?

Answer 3

Norris McWhirter

Question 4

According to WS Gilbert in the operetta Princess Ida, Man is Nature’s sole - what?

Answer 4

Mistake

Question 5

Which small appellation in the French Bourdeaux wine region shares a name with a brand of car made by the General Motors Company?

Answer 5

Cadillac

Question 6

If you are betrayed or cheated, you are said to have been sold down the river. The phrase originated in reference to which river?

Answer 6

Mississippi

Question 7

The biennial plant Isatis tinctoria was formerly cultivated as a source of which dye?

Answer 7

Woad

Question 8

Which Peruvian city was the capital of the Inca Empire at the time of the Spanish conquest?

Answer 8

Cuzco

Question 9

In Greek mythology, which favourite of Aphrodite became a hunter and died after being gored by a boar?

Answer 9

Adonis

Question 10

In the strict Inuit sense a canoe occupied by one man is known as a kayak. What, in that culture, is an umiak?

Answer 10

Woman’s canoe

Question 11

Antigua and Barbuda are part of an island state in the Caribbean. What are the literal meanings of the two words Antigua and Barbuda?

Answer 11

Ancient and Bearded

Question 12

Which Hindu diety, often portrayed in paintings as having blue skin, is the eighth incarnation or avatar of Vishnu?

Answer 12

Krishna

Question 13

Alfred Hitchcock made three films based on stories by Daphne du Maurier - Rebecca, being arguably the most famous. What are the other two?

Answer 13

Jamaica Inn, The Birds

Question 14

What is the characteristic of a plant described as saprophyte?

Answer 14

Lives on decaying matter

Question 15

Which French chemist’s law states that when any two gases react together, the volumes in which they do so are in a ration of simple whole numbers?

Answer 15

Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac

Question 16

Which of the original Jackson Five is missing from this list: Jackie, Marlon, Michael, Tito -?

Answer 16

Jermaine

Question 17

Although he was born in Huddersfield in 1916, when he became a Peer the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson took what title, after what many would say is a somewhat more picturesque place in North Yorkshire?

Answer 17

Baron Wilson of Rievaulx

Question 18

Nigel Molesworth, the schoolboy malcontent created by Ronald Searle and Geoffrey Willans, attended which terrible prep school?

Answer 18

St Custards

Question 19

Holm of Grimbister, which has only one dwelling, and is cut off from the mainland at high tide, is part of which UK island group?

Answer 19

Orkney

Question 20

Princess Mary, daughter of Charles I, was the first holder of which official title?

Answer 20

Princess Royal

Question 21

Which British actor and author, born in 1910, once shared a house with Errol Flynn on Santa Monica beach in Los Angeles, which they named Cirrhosis by the Sea?

Answer 21

David Niven

Question 22

Which Earldom, the site of a picturesque valley in Scotland, was bestowed on Prince William on the occasion of his marriage to Catherine Middleton on 29th April 2011?

Answer 22

Strathearn

Question 23

The Seagram building in New York and the Convention Hall in Chicago are among the major works of which German architect who died in 1969?

Answer 23

Mies Van Der Rohe

Question 24

Which city, in what is now Turkey, is the setting for Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors?

Answer 24

Ephesus

Question 25

Which London club, the oldest of the St James’s gentlemen’s clubs, was founded by an Italian, whose real name is believed to have been Francesco Bianco?

Answer 25

Whites

Question 26

Stirling Edge and Swirral Edge are dramatic features negotiated by walkers climbing which English mountain?

Answer 26

Helvellyn

Question 27

What were the three forenames of JRR Tolkein?

Answer 27

John Ronald Reuel

Question 28

The Emperor Claudius’s fourth wife, Agripinna the Younger, was also related to him in another way. How?

Answer 28

Niece

Question 29

What famous feature of Lords Cricket Ground was presented in 1926 by the architect Sir Herbert Baker, who had also designed the WG Grace memorial gates for the same venue a few years earlier?

Answer 29

Old father time weathervane

Question 30

The babirusa, an animal native to parts of the Indonesian Archipelago, is most closely related to which domesticated farm animal?

Answer 30

Pig

Question 31

Wagner’s opera Lohengrin was first performed in 1850 and conducted by his future father-in-law. Who was he?

Answer 31

Franz Liszt

Question 32

Drat! And Double Drat! Was the catchphrase of which often thwarted villain, in the Hanna Barbera animated series Wacky Races and its spin-offs?

Answer 32

Dick Dastardly

Question 33

The Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, now occupied by a regularly changing series of art, was originally intended on its construction in 1841 to carry an equestrian statue, until the money to construct it failed to materialise. Who was to be the subject of the statue?

Answer 33

William IV

Question 34

Which New Jersey born documentary photographer, who worked for the body known as the Farm Security Administration during the 1930s, is credited with bringing the realities of the deprivation of the Depression era to a wider public?

Answer 34

Dorothea Lange

Question 35

In the original French-language versions of the Tintin stories by Herge, what were the names of the almost-identical bowler-hatted characters known in English as Thomson and Thompson?

Answer 35

Dupont and Dupond

Question 36

Which archipelago in the South Atlantic took its English name from a central channel or sound between the two main islands, in turn named by Captain John Strong who landed on the islands in 1690?

Answer 36

Falklands

Question 37

Which is the only Swiss city to be classed as a World Heritage Site?

Answer 37

Berne

Question 38

Flying fish, of which some 64 species have been identified, belong to which taxonomic family?

Answer 38

Exoceotidae

Question 39

Which two colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, both with the same name, are named after a Scottish businessman and philanthropist, the Chairman of Great Universal Stores from 1946?

Answer 39

Wolfson

Question 40

Digging, probably the most often anthologised poem of Seamus Heaney, begins with the lines: “Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests” - what are the next four words?

Answer 40

“snug as a gun”