100 Fun Facts About Multiple Choice

Which US president demanded in Berlin, 'Tear down this wall'?

Reagan kept the phrase in his 1987 speech even though State Department and National Security Council advisers fought to cut it as too provocative; the Berlin Wall opened two years later, in November 1989.

Which Roman senator, pardoned and favoured by Julius Caesar, helped lead his assassination on the Ides of March?

Brutus hoped to save the Republic, but the murder set off a civil war in which he was beaten at Philippi and took his own life.

Napoleon's final defeat in June 1815 came at which battle?

Waterloo, fought on 18 June 1815 in present-day Belgium, saw Wellington and Blücher end Napoleon's Hundred Days; he was exiled to Saint Helena.

Which French king was on the throne when Parisians stormed the Bastille in July 1789?

Louis XVI went to the guillotine in 1793, yet the fortress whose fall began his undoing was almost empty, holding just seven prisoners that day.

Cleopatra was the last active ruler of which Egyptian dynasty?

Cleopatra VII was the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty, founded by Ptolemy I, a Macedonian general under Alexander; Plutarch says she was the first Ptolemy to learn Egyptian.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose 1914 assassination triggered World War I, was shot in which city?

Sarajevo gave Gavrilo Princip a second chance: after a bomb missed the Archduke that morning, his motorcade took a wrong turn and stopped right in front of the gunman.

World War II is generally said to have begun when Germany invaded which country in September 1939?

Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939; Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later, on 3 September.

Machu Picchu was built by which civilization?

The Inca built Machu Picchu around 1450, probably as a royal estate for the emperor Pachacuti, then abandoned it about a century later; Hiram Bingham brought it to world attention in 1911.

The Pony Express closed in October 1861, days after which coast-to-coast link was completed?

A telegraph line linked California to the East in October 1861, and the Pony Express, whose riders needed about ten days to cross the West, closed within days after only 18 months in business.

The Great Fire of London in 1666 started in a bakery on which street?

Pudding Lane was home to the king's baker, Thomas Farriner, and the fire that began in his house went on to destroy St Paul's Cathedral and about 13,000 homes.

Which English king sealed Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215?

John soon appealed to Rome: about ten weeks after he sealed Magna Carta, Pope Innocent III annulled it and England slid into civil war.

Which city is the capital of Australia?

Canberra was built from scratch as the capital, to a plan by American architect Walter Burley Griffin that won a worldwide competition; Parliament moved there from Melbourne in 1927.

Which is the world's largest island?

Greenland is about 80% covered by an ice sheet so vast that, if it all melted, global sea levels would rise by more than seven metres.

Which is the deepest lake in the world?

Baikal is also the world's oldest lake, and millions of years of isolation have filled it with species found nowhere else, including its own freshwater seal.

Which is the smallest sovereign state in the world by both area and population?

Vatican City became a state only in 1929, when the Lateran Treaty ended almost 60 years in which popes, protesting Italy's takeover of Rome, lived as self-declared prisoners in the Vatican.

Mount Fuji, visible from Tokyo on clear days, stands on which of Japan's main islands?

Honshu's Mount Fuji is still classed as an active volcano, though it has been quiet since its last eruption in 1707.

What is the capital of Iceland?

Reykjavík is the world's northernmost capital of a sovereign state, yet its buildings are kept warm by hot water piped straight from nearby hot springs.

The Amazon River empties into which ocean?

The Amazon carries more water to the Atlantic than any other river; geologists think it once flowed the other way, westward, until the rising Andes turned it around.

Angkor Wat, the largest religious complex in the world, is in which country?

Cambodia shows Angkor Wat on its national flag; King Suryavarman II built it in the 12th century as a temple to the Hindu god Vishnu, and it later became a Buddhist shrine.

Why does the Leaning Tower of Pisa lean?

It was built on soft, unstable ground and began sinking during construction; wars then halted work for almost a century, letting the soil settle and probably saving the tower from collapse.

Jørn Utzon, the architect who designed the Sydney Opera House, came from which country?

Jørn Utzon of Denmark won the 1957 design competition but resigned in 1966, seven years before the Sydney Opera House opened in 1973.

Antarctica, despite its ice, is technically classified as what kind of environment?

A desert is defined by how little rain or snow falls, not by heat, and Antarctica gets very little; the snow that does fall never melts, building its ice sheets over thousands of years.

Which country is the largest in the world by land area?

Russia would be bigger still had it not sold Alaska to the United States in 1867 for $7.2 million.

What is the chemical symbol for gold?

Au comes from aurum, the Latin for gold: Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius built the modern one- and two-letter symbols from the elements' Latin names.

Which element has the atomic number 2?

Helium has atomic number 2; it is named from the Greek helios (Sun) because it was first detected in the solar spectrum in 1868.

Which planet rotates almost on its side, with an extreme axial tilt?

Uranus is tilted about 98 degrees, perhaps after a collision with an Earth-sized body long ago, which gives it the most extreme seasons in the solar system.

Which is the hardest natural material on the Mohs scale?

Diamond is pure carbon, the same element as graphite, but each of its atoms is locked to four neighbours in a rigid lattice, making it the hardest natural substance known.

Roughly how fast does light travel in a vacuum?

Light travels about 300,000 km per second in a vacuum; the exact value, 299,792,458 metres per second, has defined the metre since 1983.

Marie Curie won Nobel Prizes in which two fields?

Physics and Chemistry: her name was left off the 1903 physics nomination until Pierre Curie, tipped off by a Swedish mathematician, objected; she won the 1911 chemistry prize alone.

Charles Darwin's five-year voyage from 1831 to 1836 was aboard which ship?

Beagle carried Darwin around the world under Captain Robert FitzRoy; along the way he ate puma, which he judged 'remarkably like veal', and in the Galápagos lived on giant tortoise meat.

Which planet's position was worked out by mathematics before anyone had knowingly seen it?

Neptune was found in 1846 by Johann Galle on his first night of searching, close to the spot where Urbain Le Verrier's calculations said an unseen planet had to be.

In plants, photosynthesis takes place inside which organelle?

Chloroplasts are thought to descend from free-living cyanobacteria that an ancestral cell engulfed long ago, which is why they still carry their own DNA.

Which is the hottest planet in the Solar System?

Venus is hotter than Mercury despite lying farther from the Sun, because its thick carbon dioxide atmosphere traps heat in a runaway greenhouse effect; the surface is hot enough to melt lead.

Alexander Fleming's 1928 discovery of penicillin came from what kind of organism?

A mould that landed by accident on one of Fleming's bacterial culture plates stopped the bacteria growing around it; he shared the 1945 Nobel Prize with Florey and Chain.

Which film won 11 Oscars in 1998, tying Ben-Hur's record?

Titanic cost about $200 million, more than any film before it, yet became the first to gross over $1 billion and won 11 of its 14 Oscar nominations.

Who directed the 1972 film The Godfather?

Francis Ford Coppola at first turned The Godfather down, dismissing Mario Puzo's novel as cheap and sleazy, and accepted only because his own film company was deep in debt.

The original 1977 Star Wars film was later given which subtitle?

A New Hope was added only in a 1981 reissue, the year after its sequel The Empire Strikes Back had opened as Episode V.

The Oscar statuette shows a knight holding a sword and standing on what?

A reel of film: its five spokes stand for the Academy's original branches, actors, directors, producers, technicians and writers.

Which was Walt Disney's first full-length animated feature film, released in 1937?

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was so costly that Hollywood nicknamed it 'Disney's Folly' during production; on release it became a box-office sensation.

The Simpsons live in a fictional town with what name?

Springfield was named after Springfield in creator Matt Groening's home state of Oregon, and he liked that the name is so common that viewers everywhere would think it was theirs.

Rick Blaine's nightclub in the film Casablanca is in which country?

Morocco never saw the cameras: Casablanca was shot at the Warner Bros. studios in California, with one sequence filmed at nearby Van Nuys Airport.

The TV drama Breaking Bad is set and filmed in which city?

Albuquerque was a late switch: Breaking Bad was originally planned for California before the production moved to New Mexico.

In The Wizard of Oz (1939), what is the name of Dorothy's dog?

Toto sets the story in motion: Dorothy runs away from the farm to save him after he bites a neighbour, Miss Gulch, who wants him destroyed.

The Beatles formed in 1960 in which English city?

The Beatles formed in Liverpool, growing out of John Lennon's skiffle group the Quarrymen, and honed their act at the Cavern Club and in Hamburg.

Beethoven's famous 'Ode to Joy' theme comes from which of his symphonies?

Ninth: by its 1824 premiere Beethoven was deaf, and by one account a singer had to turn him around so he could see the audience applauding.

Mozart was born in which city?

Mozart was born in Salzburg on 27 January 1756; he served the city's prince-archbishop as a court musician before leaving for Vienna in 1781.

What was the name of Elvis Presley's mansion in Memphis?

Graceland got its name long before Elvis moved in: the land had been a farm named for Grace Toof, whose family owned it.

Which album is the best-selling of all time worldwide?

Thriller kept selling because the hits kept coming: Michael Jackson released seven singles from it, and all seven reached the US top ten.

How many keys does a standard modern piano have?

88 keys is where a century of growth ended: pianos of Mozart's day spanned about five octaves, some 61 keys, and makers kept adding notes until they passed seven octaves.

Queen singer Freddie Mercury was born on which island?

Freddie Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara in Stone Town, Zanzibar, in 1946 to Parsi parents; the family moved to England after the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution.

Which team won the first Super Bowl, played in Los Angeles in January 1967?

Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs 35–10 in a Los Angeles stadium that was not even full: the first Super Bowl failed to sell out.

Which country hosted and won the very first FIFA World Cup in 1930?

Uruguay, already double Olympic champion, beat Argentina 4–2 in the Montevideo final; travel was so hard that only four European teams made the trip.

The first modern Olympic Games in 1896 were held in which city?

Athens was chosen at an 1894 congress in Paris, and the hosts got a fitting champion: a Greek, Spyridon Louis, won the first Olympic marathon.

How long is a marathon?

26.2 miles traces to the 1908 London Olympics, when the race was laid out to start at Windsor Castle and finish in front of the royal box in the stadium.

In the Tour de France, what colour jersey does the overall race leader wear?

Yellow was introduced in 1919 and is usually said to echo the yellow paper of L'Auto, the newspaper that organised the race.

Wimbledon, the oldest tennis tournament, is played on which court surface?

Grass once hosted three of the four majors, until the US Open abandoned it after 1974 and the Australian Open moved to hard courts in 1988.

Michael Jordan walked away from the Chicago Bulls in 1993 to play which sport professionally?

Baseball: Jordan spent 1994 with the Birmingham Barons, a Chicago White Sox farm team, hit just .202, then returned to the Bulls in 1995 and won three more titles.

Under what name was Muhammad Ali born?

Ali was born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. in Louisville, Kentucky, on 17 January 1942, and took his Muslim name in 1964 after joining the Nation of Islam.

Who wrote the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four?

George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four on the Scottish island of Jura; it was published in June 1949, months before his death in January 1950.

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is loosely based on her childhood in which state?

Alabama's Monroeville was Harper Lee's hometown, where her next-door neighbour and childhood friend Truman Capote became the model for Scout's pal Dill.

In Moby-Dick, what is the name of the obsessed captain of the Pequod?

Captain Ahab commands the Pequod; narrator Ishmael recounts Ahab's vengeful hunt for Moby Dick, the white whale that took his leg.

William Shakespeare was born and raised in which town?

Stratford-upon-Avon's Holy Trinity Church baptised Shakespeare in 1564 and holds his grave, whose epitaph curses anyone who moves his bones.

Who wrote Pride and Prejudice?

Jane Austen published Pride and Prejudice anonymously in January 1813, four years after her family settled at Chawton in Hampshire.

Under French appellation rules, where must the second fermentation that gives champagne its bubbles take place?

In the bottle: sugar and yeast are added before each bottle is sealed, so the carbon dioxide from this second fermentation stays trapped in the wine as bubbles.

Chocolate is made from the fermented seeds of which tree?

Chocolate comes from the seeds of the cacao tree, Theobroma cacao, domesticated in present-day Ecuador more than 5,000 years ago before it reached Mesoamerica.

According to legend, the three toppings of a pizza Margherita were chosen to represent what?

The Italian flag is echoed by its tomato, mozzarella and basil, a tribute legend credits to Naples pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito for Queen Margherita; later research doubts it, as the story only surfaced decades afterwards.

Which ingredient must every kind of sushi contain?

Vinegared rice is what makes it sushi, not raw fish; in 1820s Edo, Hanaya Yohei turned it into fast food by pressing fresh fish onto hand-shaped rice at a street stall.

Marzipan is made mainly from sugar and which ground nut?

Marzipan is a paste of ground almonds and sugar; Geneva's Escalade festival each December smashes a chocolate cauldron filled with marzipan vegetables.

Which country grows more coffee than any other?

Brazil's coffee story is said to have begun with a bouquet: legend has a Portuguese officer leaving French Guiana in 1727 with seeds hidden in flowers from the governor's wife.

Bitcoin's 2008 white paper was published under which pseudonym?

Satoshi Nakamoto shared the paper on a cryptography mailing list, then in 2011 told a fellow developer 'I've moved on to other things' and was never heard from again.

Who invented the World Wide Web while working at CERN in 1989?

Tim Berners-Lee's proposal came back from his boss marked 'Vague, but exciting', and CERN gave him time to build the first browser and server the following year.

Larry Page co-founded Google in 1998 with whom?

Sergey Brin and Larry Page first called their search engine BackRub, because it ranked pages by the links pointing back to them; the name Google came soon after.

Apple was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and which third partner?

Ronald Wayne sold his 10% stake back for $800 within two weeks, wary of running up debts again after his slot-machine business failed; Apple was incorporated in 1977 without him.

The Wright brothers made the first powered flight in 1903 near which town?

Kitty Hawk, North Carolina won out because the Wrights wanted steady winds and soft sand, and its weather station answered their letter; the 12-second first flight left from Kill Devil Hill, four miles away.

The Mona Lisa hangs in which museum?

The Louvre lost the Mona Lisa for more than two years after a former worker walked out with it in 1911; the worldwide hunt turned a portrait little known outside the art world into the most famous painting on Earth.

Van Gogh painted The Starry Night while a patient in which French region?

Provence is where his asylum at Saint-Rémy stood; he painted this night view by day, adding a village that could not be seen from his window.

Pablo Picasso was born in which Andalusian port city?

Málaga is where Picasso's father, a painter of birds who taught art and curated the local museum, began schooling him in drawing when he was seven.

Which skyscraper ended the Eiffel Tower's reign as the world's tallest structure?

The Chrysler Building overtook the Eiffel Tower thanks to a spire built in secret inside its frame, only to lose the title of world's tallest to the Empire State Building within a year.

Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, rises in which country?

Tanzania's Kilimanjaro is three volcanoes in one: two of its cones are extinct, but Kibo, the summit, is only dormant and still vents steam from its crater.

By what nickname is the Eiffel Tower affectionately known?

The Iron Lady translates La dame de fer; put up for a world's fair and due to be dismantled in 1909, the tower earned its keep as a radio mast instead.

Which Australian marsupial has fingerprints that are hard to tell apart from a human's?

Koala fingerprints can be hard to distinguish from human ones even under an electron microscope, although the two species evolved their ridged fingertips separately.

Which bird of prey is rated the fastest animal on Earth because of its hunting dive, called a stoop?

Peregrine falcon dives have been recorded at 242 mph, and small bony bumps in the bird's nostrils are thought to steer the rushing air aside so it can breathe.

Which costly spice is made from the hand-picked crimson stigmas of an autumn-flowering crocus?

Saffron takes about 150,000 crocus flowers to yield a single kilogram, which is why premium grades regularly sell for more than $5,000 a kilo.

Which planet's Great Red Spot is a giant storm astronomers have tracked continuously since the 1870s?

Jupiter's great storm has been shrinking for about a century: it once measured roughly three times the diameter of Earth.

Which country has the world's longest coastline, much of it winding around Arctic islands?

Canada has about 243,000 kilometres of coastline, and it also shares the world's longest land border, the one it has with the United States.

Which sport did Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard famously play on the Moon in February 1971?

Golf reached the Moon when Shepard fixed a club head to the handle of a sample scoop and, swinging one-handed in his stiff suit, struck two balls.

Which Disney animated film draws its plot of a murdered father and a scheming uncle from Hamlet?

The Lion King was billed as an original story, yet the finished film was also heavily modelled on the Bible's Joseph and Moses.

Which artist painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512 for Pope Julius II?

Michelangelo rejected the first scaffold, which hung on ropes through holes in the vault, and had his own built instead so he would not have to paint around the holes.

Which gas makes up about 78 percent of the air in Earth's atmosphere, far more than any other?

Nitrogen fills 78 percent of dry air, with oxygen at about 21 percent and argon, not carbon dioxide, a distant third.

Which metal conducts electricity better than copper but is too costly for everyday wiring?

Silver also beats every other metal at conducting heat and reflecting light, yet its price keeps it mostly to specialist jobs such as plating radio parts.

Which Shakespeare tragedy opens with three witches and is called 'The Scottish Play' by wary actors?

Macbeth is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy, and stage superstition holds that its name should never be spoken inside a theatre.

Which bone, running from the hip to the knee, is the longest in the human body?

Femur is the name of the only bone in the upper leg, and by some measures it is also the strongest bone a person has.

Which South American country, owner of the Galápagos Islands, is named after a line of latitude?

Ecuador is simply the Spanish word for equator, shortened from the official name República del Ecuador, and the line passes just north of its capital, Quito.

Which Baroque composer wrote The Four Seasons, four violin concertos published in Amsterdam in 1725?

Vivaldi published each concerto alongside a sonnet describing its season, and may well have written the poems himself.

Which treaty, signed in a palace's Hall of Mirrors in 1919, formally ended World War I with Germany?

Versailles was a pointed choice of venue: the German Empire had been proclaimed in the same hall in 1871, and France's Clemenceau wanted it undone in that very room.

Which country has more ancient pyramids than Egypt, raised as tombs by the Kushite rulers of Nubia?

Sudan has more than 200 pyramids, the most of any country, and they are smaller, steeper and narrower than Egypt's famous ones.

Which element, first made at Berkeley in 1955, honours the father of the periodic table?

Mendelevium was named during the Cold War, so its American discoverers first had to ask their own government for permission to honour Dmitri Mendeleev.

Which stirrup-shaped bone, which carries sound to the inner ear, is the smallest in the human body?

Stapes is a Medieval Latin coinage, because classical Latin had no word for a stirrup: the Romans rode without them.

Which mountain kingdom, largest of the world's three enclaved states, is surrounded by South Africa?

Lesotho is also the only independent state lying entirely above 1,000 metres, which keeps it cooler all year than other places at the same latitude.

Which strait runs through Istanbul, linking the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara?

Bosporus shipping squeezes through the world's narrowest strait used for international navigation, a channel that leaves Istanbul straddling Europe and Asia.