Quiz 50 Flashcards
Where would you find the Mohorovicic Discontinuity?
Within the Earth (crust and mantle)
According to Rupert Brooke’s poem, The Soldier, there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England. After his own untimely death in 1915, Brooke was himself buried in a foreign field, in which country?
Greece
Which term is used to describe the split in the Church of Scotland when, in 1843, its Evangelical wing formed the Free Church of Scotland?
The Disruption
When Leonidas led his three hundred Spartans to their deaths at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480BC, he was accompanied by four hundred soldiers from Thebes and seven hundred from which other Greek city?
Thespiae
The novel Futility, written by Morgen Robertson and published in 1898, described an event that was to make it seem tragically prophetic a few years later. What was its subject matter?
Titanic
What’s the name of the large bone at the base of the spine which connects at the top with the last lumbar vertebra, and at the bottom with the coccyx?
Sacrum
The author of the book 10 Rillington Place, an account of the Christie murders published in 1961, has been credited with having played a major role in the abolition of capital punishment. Who was he?
Ludovic Kennedy
If you suffer from trichotillomania, what are you compelled irrationally to do?
Tearing your hair out
In 1954, Elvis Presley released his first single, a cover of a song made popular by the blues singer Arthur Big Boy Crudup. What was its title?
That’s All Right Mama
In the ancient process known as encaustic painting, by which Egyptians, Greeks and Romans made paintings on walls, what substance was mixed with the coloured pigments in order to fix the design?
Beeswax
What species was Ota Benga, the star exhibit of the Bronx Zoo in the summer of 1906?
Human
The Bactrian Camel is named after a region in which country?
Afghanistan
Which organisation began life as a body called the Office of Strategic Services?
CIA
John Dryden’s play All For Love, of The World Well Lost, deals with the romance between the same two historical figures as which play by Shakespeare?
Anthony and Cleopatra
One of the first setbacks for Edward Heath’s newly elected Conservative government in 1970 was the death, a month after the election, of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Who was he?
Ian McLeod
Can you name the Austro-Hungarian officer who gained notoriety just before the First World War by betraying military secrets to the Russions. A film about his life, starring Klaus Maria Bransuer, was released in the mid-1980s
Colonel Alfred Redl
One of George Orwell’s most celebrated essays was entitled Inside the Whale. Which writer produced a scathing attack on the depiction of India in British Literature in a 1984 essay called Outside the Whale?
Salman Rushdie
Which term, alluding to a well-known fairytale, do some astronomers use to describe the zone of space around a star where temperatures and conditions are neither too hot or too cold for water, and possibly for life?
Goldilocks
Part of the series of 2010 stamps commemorating the art of the album cover, the painting A Basket Of Roses by French artist Henri Fantin-Latour was included as it had been used on the cover of a 1983 record by which group?
New Order
In a compound in which town in Pakistan was Osama Bin Laden discovered and shot dead in May 2011?
Abbottabad
Which historical figure is thought by many to have become sole king of his people following the murder of his brother and co-ruler Bleda around 455AD
Atilla the Hun
Which word, in common use, is taken from the Greek for Circle of animals?
Zodiac
The acronym OVNI, common to French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, is the equivalent of which three letter abbreviation in English?
UFA
If you were practising catoptromancy, which everyday object would you be using to predict the future?
Mirror
Derived from the Latin for lightning, what name is given to the tubes of glassy mieral matter formed in sand or soil by lightning strikes?
Fulgurites
A tyrannosaur, as everyone knows, was a dinosaur. But what is a tyrannulet?
Bird
Throughout his political career, Enoch Powell only held one cabinet post. What was it?
Minister for Health
Pedology is the science of what?
Soils
Many British athletic clubs derive at least part of their name from which form of cross country racing that became popular in English public schools from the 18th century?
Hare and hounds
When she was made a life peer in 1992, Mrs Thatcher became Baroness Thatcher of where?
Kesteven
In the traditional game table skittles, what name is used for the ball of disc or lump cast at the pins, a name sometimes also given to the plastic tokens won for a correct answer in the game of Trivial Pursuit?
Cheese
What is a Scotch Argus?
Butterfly
Which acclaimed Scandinavian film of 1967 is about an affair between a married Swedish army lieutenant and a tightrope-walker?
Elvira Madigan
Which English writer once telegraphed to his wife Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I be?
Gk Chesterton
Considered a prophet in Islam, how is the patiently enduring Ayyub, who appears in the Qur’an, known in the equivalent eponymous book of the Bible?
Job
Being sweeter and less prone to crystallisaition, the mixture of fructose and glucose obtained by splitting sucrose into those two components is given what name?
Inverted sugar
London was frequently referred to in the 19th century as The Great Wen. What is a wen?
Wart or tumour
The German born theologian Tomas a Kempis, the reformer Martin Luther and the Austrian botanist and geneticist Gregor Mendel all belonged to which monastic order?
Augustinians
Which character in Shakespeare speaks the lines that begin The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne/ Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold/ Purple the sails and so perfumed that/ The winds were love-sick with them?
Enobarbus
In what way did Rosemary Watson achieve a notable first on British radio in 1957?
First female Brain of Britain
