Season 4 - Week 6 Flashcards
Which major river delta is formed in Louisiana by the confluence of the namesake river with the Gulf of Mexico, creating one of the largest areas of coastal wetlands in the United States?
Mississippi river delta
The winner of the US’s National Book Award for Nonfiction, the 1951 book The Sea Around Us was written by which American marine biologist and conservationist? It was the second part in her “sea trilogy” which explored the science and poetry of the sea.
Rachel Carson
The political ideology named after this man has been described as a “third position” ideology as it rejects both capitalism and communism, although The Economist dismissed it as “a vague blend of nationalism and labourism”. The Argentine populist ideology described is named after which Army General-turned-politician who was three-time President of his country? The ideology’s influence has seen parties such as the Justicialist Party dominate Argentina’s political landscape since 1946, whenever free elections have been held.
Juan Perón (accept Perónism)
Which French existentialist philosopher, feminist, and novelist won the prestigious Prix Goncourt for her 1954 novel Les Mandarins (The Mandarins)?
Simone de Beauvoir
Vincent van Gogh is best-known for his paintings of sunflowers, but he also painted a noted series of works depicting which other flower while at the Saint Paul-de-Mausole asylum during the final year of his life? In 1987, one painting in the series became the most expensive painting ever sold.
iris
Although it is not the capital of its country, which large port is the most populous city in Africa’s Maghreb region? Located on the Atlantic coast of the Chaouia [show-wee-a] plain, this city is considered Africa’s largest financial centre.
Casablanca or Dar al-Bayda
The violinist Nigel Kennedy had one of the best-selling classical albums of all time with his recordings of Le quattro stagioni (The Four Seasons), a collection of works by which Venetian composer?
Antonio Vivaldi
Thomas Mann’s son, Klaus, is best remembered today for which 1936 novel in which the Faustian central character, Hendrik Höfgen, collaborates with the Nazis in return for social favour?
Mephisto
Many authors are quoted and/or alluded to in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In line 98, Eliot introduces a “sylvan scene”, an allusion to a line in which Satan comes into view of Eden in the fourth book of which 17th century English epic poem?
Paradise Lost
In 1893, Mohandas K. Gandhi travelled to which British colony in south-eastern Africa to represent the firm Dada Abdulla & Co in a £40,000 civil lawsuit? This colony lay in an area discovered by Vasco da Gama on Christmas Day, 1497, and was one of the four colonies that formed the Union of South Africa in 1910.
Natal (accept KwaZulu Natal)
Established as a colony in 734 BCE, Syracuse was the largest Greek city in the world by the 3rd century BCE. On which island was this city established?
Sicily or Sicilia
Literally meaning ‘avoidance of violence’ in Sanskrit, which central tenet of Jainism, that is also found in Hinduism and Buddhism, bars the killing or injuring of living beings?
ahimsa
Which two physicists give their name to an experiment, famous in the field of quantum optics, that measures the second order correlation function of light? In this experiment, which they devised in the 1950s, the incident light is split onto two independent photodetectors, where the time-dependent intensity at each detector is recorded.
Robert Hanbury-Brown and Richard Q. Twiss (accept HBT)
Which ground-breaking work of feminist philosophy did Simone de Beauvoir publish in 1949? Published in two volumes - Les Faits et les Mythes (Facts and Myths) and L’expérience vécue (Lived Experience) - this book was enormously influential on second-wave feminism.
The Second Sex or Le Deuxième Sexe
What was the first name of Thomas Mann’s daughter, and sister of Klaus, who wrote the 1938 book School for Barbarians: Education Under the Nazis*? She married the poet W.H. Auden purely to obtain a British passport.
Erika
In the 1950s, Ernst Mayr sought to simplify the muddled taxonomy of early humans by reclassifying all known specimens into one of three species. The earliest of these, Homo transvaalensis, is no longer a recognised species with many specimens having since been reclassified as belonging to which genus of Hominins that lived from around 4.5 to 1.9 million years ago? Famous fossils of this genus include the Taung Child, Mrs Ples, and Lucy.
Australopithecus (or A. afarensis or A. africanus; accept australopithecine)
Also known as the Sundarbans Delta or Bengal Delta, the world’s largest river delta empties into the Bay of Bengal. It is formed by the combined waters of several rivers, most notably the Brahmaputra and which other river that gives the delta its most common name?
Ganges or Ganga or Padma
Syracuse was founded in the same year as Sicily’s present-day capital, Palermo. While Syracuse was founded by the Greeks, Palermo was founded as Ziz - meaning ‘flower’ - by which civilization from the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, whose territory was centred on modern-day Lebanon? The name by which we know these people is Greek in origin and likely refers to their best-known export, a much sought-after dye also known as Tyrian purple.
Phoenicia or Phoenicians
Which acid, with the chemical formula CH₃COOH, is typically found in vinegar at concentrations of around 5%?
acetic acid or ethanoic acid
Gandhi made the decision to fight racial discrimination in South Africa at which city’s railway station? The capital and second-largest city in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, Gandhi spent a night here after he was thrown out of a train for refusing to vacate the first-class carriage despite having a valid ticket.
Pietermaritzburg (accept umGungundlovu or Martizburg or PMB)
What was the title of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book that documents the adverse environmental effects caused by the indiscriminate use of pesticides? The book had a galvanising effect on the environmental movement and has been described by Sir David Attenborough as probably the book that has changed the scientific world the most, after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
Silent Spring
Derived from the Sanskrit for “five principles”, Pancasila [panch-a-seel-a] was the founding philosophical theory of which country? The five principles that comprise Pancasila, largely formulated to prevent the development of a theocratic state, have been redefined over time but were first stated in 1944 by the man who would soon become this country’s first independent President.
Indonesia
Black Iris is among the best-known paintings of which “Mother of American modernism” whose works commonly contain enlarged flowers and cow skulls?
Georgia O’Keeffe
Banking, the oil industry, salt processing, and the production of cement are among the major commercial considerations of which city on the Gulf of Sidra? This major seaport is considered Libya’s second city.
Benghazi
