Simon's Christmas Quizzes

Midyear Quiz, June 2022

1. After repeated failures to honour bookings for Have I Got News For You, whose place was eventually taken by a tub of lard?

Roy Hattersley

2. What would you be doing if you used the well-known 4-4-4-2 guideline?

Baking a sponge. (4oz of butter, sugar and flour; 2 eggs) [Accept similar.]

3. How many novels did Emily Brontë write?

One. (Wuthering Heights.)

4. Which two European countries have names that are 75% identical in English?

Slovakia and Slovenia

5. Who in a 1964 song is "all of thiry-one and he's only seventeen"?

The Universal Soldier [The Universal Soldier, Buffy Sainte-Marie; Covered by Donovan in 1965]

6. What is the lightweight high-strength material developed in the 60s and used in body armour as well as racing sails and bicycle tires?

Kevlar

7. Which character in a famous book says "Time for a little something"?

Winnie-the-Pooh (A A Milne) [Accept Pooh Bear; Pooh.]

8. Which 1979 film features the character Ellen Ripley?

Alien

9. What is a zither?

A musical instrument with many strings. (Strictly, a class of stringed instruments. The Concert Zither has 29 to 38 strings.) [Accept stringed instrument.]

10. Who is traditionally regarded as the first pope?

St Peter [Accept Peter the Apostle, Peter the Rock, Simon Peter.]

11. Who were Peter Rabbit's three sisters?

Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton-tail

12. Which fictional character is described as "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!"?

Ebenezer Scrooge (A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens)

13. What was the 'pale blue dot' photographed by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990?

Earth.

14. Which is the only Nordic country to use the Euro as its currency?

Finland

15. What is produced from the rubber tree and used to make rubber?

Latex

16. In which country is Sugarloaf Mountain?

Brazil.

17. Which footballer famously performed a robotic dance goal celebration?

Peter Crouch

18. What kind of animal is a Bombay Duck?

Fish [Lizardfish]

19. What was set at 4ft 8½in by an 1846 Act of Parliament?

Standard railway gauge. [4ft 8½in for most of GB, 7ft for the Great Western, and 5ft 3in for Ireland.]

20. Which geographical subregion has a name meaning many islands?

Polynesia

21. Which birds lay the largest eggs?

Ostriches. (Now regarded as two distinct African species in the genus Struthio.) [Accept ostrich, common ostrich, somali ostrich (aka blue-necked ostrich).]

22. Who played Holly Golightly in the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany's?

Audrey Hepburn

23. Who was born in 1879, and famously assassinated in 1940 with an ice axe?

Leon Trotsky. (Lev Davidovich Bronstein.)

24. In which city is the famous Via Dolorosa?

Jerusalem

25. Who served four separate terms as UK Prime Minister?

William Ewart Gladstone [December 1868 – February 1874, April 1880 – June 1885, February 1886 – July 1886, August 1892 – March 1894]

26. In which country is the bolivar the unit of currency?

Venezuela. (Strictly speaking the Venezuelan bolivar replaced the bolivar in 2008. The currency is named for the hero of Latin American independence Simón Bolívar.)

27. Which football team was Alf Garnett's biggest passion in life?

West Ham United

28. What is the SI unit of electric current?

The ampere. [Accept amp.]

29. In target archery what name is used for the colour of the inner rings?

Gold

30. What is the name of the island in Table Bay where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 of the 27 years he served behind bars?

Robben Island

31. The white cliffs of Dover get their striking colour from which sedimentary rock?

Chalk (with streaks of black flint). (Deposited in the Late Cretaceous.)

32. In which language was the Magna Carta written?

Latin

33. Who wrote the 1963 Cold War novel 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold'?

John le Carré

34. Who wrote the 1886 gothic novella 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'?

Robert Louis Stevenson.

35. What is a Blenheim Orange?

An apple cultivar

36. Which medical speciality is sometimes called snot, wax & tonsils?

Ear, Nose and Throat. [Accept ENT; otorhinolaryngology; otolaryngology.)

37. What colour is an aeroplane's "black box" flight recorder?

Orange

38. Which European capital lies on the river Tagus?

Lisbon

39. Who became synonymous with the swingometer after it's reintroduction for the 1992 general election?

Peter Snow

40. What nationality is the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro?

British. (Born in Nagasaki but moved to Britain when he was five.)

41. Which poet was a librarian at Hull University?

Philip Larkin

42. The cosmic microwave background radiation is critical evidence for which theory?

Big Bang

43. With which domestic animal is the English painter George Stubbs particularly associated?

Horses

44. From which plant is saffron obtained?

Crocus. (Stigma and style of Crocus sativus.)

45. In Rugby Union which player normally throws the ball in at a lineout?

Hooker.

46. Who first appeared in the 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet?

Sherlock Holmes (Accept Dr Watson)

47. Who said “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”?

Bill Clinton

48. What is the main artery of the body called?

Aorta

49. Who opened the 1936 Olympics?

Adolf Hitler

50. Who is celebrated with a federal holiday in the USA on the third Monday of January?

Martin Luther King Jr.