Christmas Quiz 2022 – Christmas Quizzes

1. In a song made famous by Nancy Sinatra, what is made from "strawberries, cherries and an angel's kiss in spring"?

Summer Wine.

2. In which modern day country is the centre of the ancient Hittite Empire?

Turkey (north-central Anatolia)

3. In which US state is Area 51?

Nevada

4. The word melon derives from the Greek for which fruit?

Apple. [Accept gourd, since the Greek is mēlopépōn, apple-shaped melon]

5. What is the only resident corvid on Iceland?

Raven (Common raven, Corvus corax)

6. Dale Cooper was the protagonist in which TV series?

Twin Peaks

7. MediaCityUK in Salford lies on the banks of which waterway?

Manchester Ship Canal

8. Whose marriage proposal did Amanda Knatchbull reject in 1980?

Prince Charles (Now King Charles III)

9. What is the Dewey Decimal System?

A (proprietary) library classification system. (Strictly called the Dewey Decimal Classification.)

10. The small uninhabited island of Ailsa Craig in the Firth of Clyde is associated with which sport?

Curling. (Two thirds of curling stones are made of granite from the island.)

11. What is the alternative common name for liquid mercury which suggests that it is alive?

Quicksilver. (Quick means ‘living’, from Old English ‘cwic’.)

12. Which car manufacturer has a trident logo based on the Fountain of Neptune in Bologna's Piazza Maggiore?

Maserati. (The company was founded in Bologna, though now based in Modena.)

13. Which animal has mature males that smell of curry?

The western grey kangaroo (Macropus fuliginosus). [Accept kangaroo.]

14. The words chocolate, tomato, chilli and avocado originate from which language?

Nahuatl. [Accept Aztec or Mexicano.]

15. What is a panache?

An ornamental plume of feathers (or tassels), especially as worn on a helmet or cap.

16. Mistress Ford and Mistress Page are the characters refered to in the title of which play?

The Merry Wives of Windsor (William Shakespeare, 1602. Also called ‘Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor’.)

17. What name is given to the hypothesized material that has not been directly observed but thought to make up 27% of the universe?

Dark matter. [Do NOT accept dark energy.]

18. The Leveller is a monthly newspaper covering which English county?

Somerset. (Partly in allusion to the Somerset Levels.)

19. Whose last words were revealed in June 2005 to be "I will not die! I cannot die!"?

Dalek Emperor

20. What did Reginald Bosanquet's father invent?

The googly.

21. Which English football team won eight major trophies in the C20th in years ending in the number one, and released a record about it in 1991?

Tottenham Hotspur

22. What is the title of Tom Stoppard's absurdist tragicomedy about the exploits of two minor characters from Shakespeare?

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. (First staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966.)

23. What was Thomas Hardy's first major literary success, about the life and tribulations of Bathsheba Everdene?

Far from the Madding Crowd (1874).

24. What lies on the Zambezi at the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe?

Victoria Falls.

25. What often begins with 192.168?

A local IP address.

26. Kilgore Trout is a recurrent character in the works of which influential C20th author?

Kurt Vonnegut. (Trout is sometimes viewed as the author’s alter ego.)

27. Which famous trophy was fashioned from melted silver rupees, and decorated with king cobras and an elephant?

The Calcutta Cup. (Awarded to the winner of the annual Six Nations Rugby Union match between Scotland and England. Three snakes form handles and an elephant sits atop the lid.)

28. In tennis scoring, what is the French equivalent of deuce?

Égalité. (Only called when the points are equal and both sides have four or more.) [Accept Quarante A, which is called when points are three all.]

29. The Charge of the Light Brigade was a disastrous engagement for British cavalry in which war?

The Crimean War (1853 -1856).

30. Which country was the first to receive nul points in the Eurovision Song Contest?

Belgium. (1962, Fud Leclerc singing Ton Nom.)

31. In which modern-day country was Sputnik I launched in 1957?

Kazakhstan. (From the 5th Tyuratam range in Kazakh SSR, now known as the Baikonur Cosmodrome.)

32. In a famous song, what were the boys of the NYPD choir singing?

Galway Bay. (Fairytale of New York, by The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl, 1987.)

33. To which order of insects do the fireflies belong?

Beetles (Coleoptera).

34. Which river flows through Marlborough, Hungerford and Newbury before joining the Thames at Reading?

River Kennet.

35. Who composed the opera 'The Barber of Seville'?

Gioachino Rossini (1816). [Also accept Giovanni Paisiello (1782)]

36. Who said in 1985 that "in the Russian language there isn't even a word for freedom"?

Ronald Reagan (in an interview with the BBC). (The word is ‘swoboda’.)

37. What word is used for a person who petitions a higher court for the reversal of a decision by a lower court.

Appellant

38. Who was the long-standing Liverpool FC goalkeeper famous for his wobbly legs routine to unnerve penalty takers?

Bruce Grobbelaar. (On Liverpool’s books 1981–1994)

39. The Copenhagen interpretation is a set of principles in which field of science?

Quantum mechanics. [In reference to the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen, where Bohr and Heisenberg worked in the 1920s.]

40. Who is traditionally credited with the authorship of the first five books of the Old Testament?

Moses. (Difficult to maintain anymore, since it clearly has multiple authors.)

41. What is the comic play by Noël Coward about a séance and its consequences?

Blithe Spirit (1941).

42. What is the common generic name for the various pounamu stones that play an important role in Maori culture?

New Zealand greenstone. [Accept greenstone. Accept New Zealand jade, even though some types are not jade.]

43. Where did the EastEnders characters Den and Angie Watts spend their honeymoon in 1986?

On the Orient Express.

44. What is known in Denmark as Spandauer?

Danish pastries. (More generically called wienerbrød, because they were introduced by Viennese patissiers.)

45. Who wrote the poem 'The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner'?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834). (The poem was published in 1798.)

46. Which character in fiction says "I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up"?

Captain Ahab. (Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, 1851.)

47. What is traditionally listed from 15 down to 9 followed by 1 up to 8?

Rugby Union team players.

48. Who casts Narnia into an endless winter with no Christmas?

Jadis, the White Witch. [Accept either.]

49. Christmas Island is a territory of which country?

Australia

50. In which continent did turkeys originate?

North America