Quiz #51

What American city shares its name with a brand of cream cheese, despite the cheese being invented in New York?

Question 2

What food product was developed in Australia by Cyril Callister in the 1920s as a result of Marmite imports from the UK being disrupted due to World War I?

Question 3

In her upcoming memoir Finding My Way, Nobel laureate and girls education activist Malala Yousafzai admits to trying cannabis at Oxford University by using what type of common drug apparatus?

Question 4

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence are both novels looking at the moral failings of upper class society in which American city?

Question 5

Film score writer Hildur Guðnadóttir, jazz pop musician Laufey, opera soprano Disella Larusdottir, and classical pianist Víkingur Ólafsson are the Grammy-award winning musicians to have come from which country – an award that to date has eluded countrywoman Björk Guðmundsdóttir despite 16 nominations?

Question 6

In February 2025, Chinese cook Li Enhai broke his own world record for making the thinnest handmade example of what food, measuring only 0.18mm?

Question 7

Which two members of the X-Men film franchise cast, who respectively played Professor X and Magneto, have received knighthoods for their services to drama, both having been members of the Royal Shakespeare Company?

Question 8

Not including Singapore, which is technically a separate island, which three countries have land situated on the Malay peninsula? 

Question 9

The chemical reaction that produces rust through general atmospheric exposure requires what three reactants?

Question 10

Make the longest word possible from the following letters: ACEHIMMNS

Round 1 points
(Maximum: 23)

Round 2

Question 1

From which country is María Machado, the winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for ‘her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy’?

Question 2

The joint winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics were John Clarke, John Martinis, and Michel Devoret, who won ‘for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit’. At which university do the three serve as professors – one as Professor Emeritus – either at the Santa Barbara or Berkeley campuses?

Question 3

From what country is the coin known in English as a ‘piece of eight’, famously referred to by Long John Silver’s parrot in the novel Treasure Island?

Question 4

Which British celebrity cook, who baked the cake that appears on The Rolling Stones’s Let It Bleed album cover, started dropping her surname from her book titles in 1998 when she published the first of her How to Cook series?

Question 5

Named by film critic Roger Ebert as one of his 10 greatest films of all time, the Up documentary film series has followed the same group of 14 people since 1964, catching up with their lives every how many years – the number also being the age they were when the first episode was filmed?

Question 6

Published in 2023, based of research that started in 2015, a controversial scientific paper by paleoanthropologist Lee Burger and his team has proposed that Homo naledi living at the Rising Star cave system in South Africa engaged in what type of ritual behaviour roughly 250000 years ago, 100000 years before the earliest examples of such behaviour found in Homo sapiens?

Question 7

What were the first names of the double act Laurel and Hardy?

Question 8

What three colours appear on the transgender pride flag, first created by Monica Helms in 1999?

Question 9

The traditional English pound cake is so called because the recipe involves using a pound of what four ingredients?

Question 10

What five countries in South America contain land with an elevation of 6000m above sea level?

Round 2 points
(Maximum: 20)

Total points
(Maximum: 43)

Round 3

Question 1

Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds within a sentence or phrase to create a pleasing or memorable rhythm. What is the term for the repetition of vowel sounds to achieve the same effect?

Question 2

Between 2003 and 2005, the South Korean capital Seoul undertook a project to ‘reclaim’ the city’s downtown Cheonggyecheon river, refilling it with water and turning it into a walkway and public space. Previously filled with concrete, what infrastructure had sat on the area before the reclamation project?

Question 3

On Sunday qualifier Valentin Vacherot became the lowest ranked player to win a tennis Masters Series when, ranked 204 in the world, he defeated his cousin Arthur Rinderknech to win the Shanghai Masters, having already beaten world number 5 Novak Djokovic in the semi-finals and world number 11 Holger Rune in the quarter-finals. What European microstate does Vacherot represent?

Question 4

Which American rock singer won a National Book Award in 2010 for her memoir Just Kids, which details her friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe as the two live a bohemian life in a New York squat in the 1960s and then independently find fame in the 1970s, before Robert is diagnosed and dies of AIDS in the 1980s?

Question 5

Scanning, transmission, and scanning transmission are forms of what type of microscope, first tentatively proposed as a concept in the late 19^th century but which made great advances in the 1930s after being officially invented in 1931 by Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll?

Question 6

In structural and civil engineering, the effective projected area, or EPA, is a measurement calculated to ensure objects can safely withstand what?

Question 7

The trading name of ExxonMobil, petrol retailer Esso takes its name from the letters S and O, the initials of its former name. For what did the letters S and O stand?

Question 8

Despite having 19 US number ones, American singer Mariah Carey has only topped the UK charts with what three songs? Two of songs were cover versions, one of which was an international number 1 for Nilsson, and the other a US number one for Phil Collins.

Question 9

October 13 is Thanksgiving Day in Canada, which is not one of the country’s five statutory nationwide holidays due to being optional in which four of the nation’s provinces, all on the Atlantic coast?

Question 10

According to a report by environmental consultancy firm Eunomia, which five countries were the largest producers of plastic polymers in the world in 2024, four of which are in Asia?

Round 3 points
(Maximum: 20)

Total points
(Maximum: 63)

Round 4

Question 1

According to the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, coastal nations’ exclusive economic zones stretch 200 nautical miles (370km) from their coastline. What two-word term is given to the area of water beyond this, often also referred to by the non-legal term ‘international waters’?

Question 2

In 1961, Severny Island in the Russian Arctic was the site of the largest ever what manmade event?

Question 3

Famous in England in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, what were the Admiral’s Men and the King’s Men, also respectively known for a period of time as the Earl of Nottingham’s Men and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men?

Question 4

The Parting of the Waters landmark at Two Ocean Pass sees the North Two Ocean Creek split into two, with one portion running down one side of the Continental Divide towards the Pacific Ocean, 1,353 miles away, and the other down the other side of the divide towards the Atlantic Ocean, 3,488 miles away, therefore making it the only known waterway in the US that ultimately runs into separate oceans. In what state is Parting of the Waters?

Question 5

All at one point married to children of Queen Elizabeth II, Diana Spencer, Camilla Parker-Bowles, and Sarah Ferguson are all descendants of an illegitimate child born to Louise de Kérouaille, a mistress of which English monarch?

Question 6

Celebrating its 10^th anniversary in 2025, what company with a two-word rhyming and alliterative name advertises itself as offering ‘the definitive bingo experience’, in which traditional bingo is mixed with rave music, light shows, live performers, sing-alongs, fancy dress, male dancers in dresses, foam parties, and alcohol?

Question 7

Which German car manufacturer and which New York fashion house – the latter founded in 2014 by Teddy Santis – have collaborated on five car restoration projects since 2020, with the cars displayed at the brand’s New York and London flagship stores?

Question 8

Which three teams currently playing in the English Premier League have also played in the 4^th tier – now known as Division 2, but called Division 3 until 2004 – in the 21^st century?

Question 9

What are the world’s five extant species of rhinoceros, two of which are named for colours, two for islands, and one for a facial feature?

Question 10

Including the 2000 election, who have been the seven nominees of the US Republican and Democrat parties that have lost Presidential elections in the 21^st century?

Round 4 points
(Maximum: 23)

Total points
(Maximum: 86)

Round 5

In Round 5, there is only one answer. The less clues you need to get it, the more points you receive. If you need only one clue, you receive 10 points; if you require two clues, you will receive 9 points, and so on.

However, you may only answer once. If you answer incorrectly, you receive zero points for the round.

The following are amongst the cast of what film?

Clue 1

Clue 2

Clue 3

Clue 4

Clue 5

Clue 6

Clue 7

Clue 8

Clue 9

Clue 10

Round 5 points
(Maximum: 10)

Total points
(Maximum: 96)