Quiz 50

Question 1

Where would you find the Mohorovicic Discontinuity?

Answer 1

Within the Earth (crust and mantle)

Question 2

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?

Answer 2

Greece

Question 3

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?

Answer 3

The Disruption

Question 4

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?

Answer 4

Thespiae

Question 5

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?

Answer 5

The sinking of an ocean liner called the Titan

Question 6

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?

Answer 6

Sacrum

Question 7

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?

Answer 7

Ludovic Kennedy

Question 8

If you suffer from trichotillomania, what are you compelled irrationally to do?

Answer 8

Tearing your hair out

Question 9

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?

Answer 9

That’s All Right Mama

Question 10

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?

Answer 10

Beeswax

Question 11

What species was Ota Benga, the star exhibit of the Bronx Zoo in the summer of 1906?

Answer 11

Human

Question 12

The Bactrian Camel is named after a region in which country?

Answer 12

Afghanistan

Question 13

Which organisation began life as a body called the Office of Strategic Services?

Answer 13

CIA

Question 14

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?

Answer 14

Anthony and Cleopatra

Question 15

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?

Answer 15

Ian McLeod

Question 16

Can you name the Austro-Hungarian officer who gained notoriety just before the First World War by betraying military secrets to the Russians. A film about his life, starring Klaus Maria Brandauer, was released in the mid-1980s

Answer 16

Colonel Alfred Redl

Question 17

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?

Answer 17

Salman Rushdie

Question 18

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?

Answer 18

Goldilocks

Question 19

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?

Answer 19

New Order

Question 20

In a compound in which town in Pakistan was Osama Bin Laden discovered and shot dead in May 2011?

Answer 20

Abbottabad

Question 21

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

Answer 21

Attila the Hun

Question 22

Which word, in common use, is taken from the Greek for Circle of animals?

Answer 22

Zodiac

Question 23

The acronym OVNI, common to French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, is the equivalent of which three letter abbreviation in English?

Answer 23

UFO

Question 24

If you were practising catoptromancy, which everyday object would you be using to predict the future?

Answer 24

Mirror

Question 25

Derived from the Latin for lightning, what name is given to the tubes of glassy mineral matter formed in sand or soil by lightning strikes?

Answer 25

Fulgurites

Question 26

A tyrannosaur, as everyone knows, was a dinosaur. But what is a tyrannulet?

Answer 26

Bird

Question 27

Throughout his political career, Enoch Powell only held one cabinet post. What was it?

Answer 27

Minister for Health

Question 28

Pedology is the science of what?

Answer 28

Soils

Question 29

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?

Answer 29

Hare and hounds

Question 30

When she was made a life peer in 1992, Mrs Thatcher became Baroness Thatcher of where?

Answer 30

Kesteven

Question 31

In the traditional game table skittles, what name is used for the ball, 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?

Answer 31

Cheese

Question 32

What is a Scotch Argus?

Answer 32

Butterfly

Question 33

Which acclaimed Scandinavian film of 1967 is about an affair between a married Swedish army lieutenant and a tightrope-walker?

Answer 33

Elvira Madigan

Question 34

Which English writer once telegraphed to his wife “Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I be?”

Answer 34

GK Chesterton

Question 35

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?

Answer 35

Job

Question 36

Being sweeter and less prone to crystalisation, the mixture of fructose and glucose obtained by splitting sucrose into those two components is given what name?

Answer 36

Inverted sugar

Question 37

London was frequently referred to in the 19th century as The Great Wen. What is a wen?

Answer 37

Wart or tumour

Question 38

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?

Answer 38

Augustinians

Question 39

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”?

Answer 39

Enobarbus

Question 40

In what way did Rosemary Watson achieve a notable first on British radio in 1957?

Answer 40

First female Brain of Britain