23. On what continent will one find Vinson Massif, its tallest mountain?
24. True or false: Prague is east of Vienna.
25. True or false: Alaska’s Near Islands in the Aleutians are west of Wellington, New Zealand.
26. If you’re in Calais, Maine, are you closer to San Diego, California, or Dublin, Ireland?
27. True or false: The Atlantic end of the Panama Canal is west of the Pacific end.
28. What is Great Britain?
29. What is the deepest gorge in the United States?
30. Of Suriname, Gabon, Guinea, Mauritania, and Senegal, which country isn’t in Africa?
31. What is Hong Kong?
32. Where would one find Death Valley?
33. In what body of water is Bermuda?
34. How many cities in California are called “Hollywood ”?
35. Of London, Dallas, and Washington, DC, which city has the lowest average annual precipitation?
36. In what city is the Pentagon?
37. Which U.S. states are located partly or wholly north of the southernmost piece of Canada, including Pelee Island?
38. In what part of the United States did the practice of branding cattle begin?
39. Where is the Sierra Nevada mountain range?
40. What is the largest non-Alaskan national park in the United States?
41. What continent has the highest average elevation?
42. What is the difference between the Netherlands and Holland?
43. From what ocean does the Panama Canal receive water?
44. In what United States city was the first skyscraper built?
45. What is the world’s largest lake in surface area rather than in volume?
46. What is the largest sand desert?
47. What is the largest city park in the United States?
48. Where is most of the gold stored in the United States held?
49. Where are the Plains of Abraham?
50. In 1836, the Battle of the Alamo was fought over what territory?
Quiz 6 Answers
Geography
1. The first European settlement in New England was not Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620 but near the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine in 1607 (in present-day Phippsburg) under the leadership of George Popham. It did not last more than a year, though, because of a hard winter and the death of the colony’s chief sponsors.
2. Big Ben is not the clock but the largest bell in the clock, named after Sir Benjamin Hall, the commissioner of works in 1859 when the bell was installed.
3. Florida’s westernmost key is not Key West because the Marquesas Keys are west of Key West; the Dry Tortugas, home of the Fort Jefferson National Monument, are west of the Marquesas Keys. In short, the Dry Tortugas are Florida’s westernmost keys.
4. The easternmost state in the United States is not Maine but Alaska, some of whose Aleutian Islands (the Rat Islands and the Near Islands) lie west of the eightieth meridian, which divides the Eastern and Western Hemispheres.
5. A hole dug in the United States until it reaches the other side would lead not to China but to an area in the Indian Ocean west of Australia and east of South Africa. Note that both the United States and China are in the Northern Hemisphere.
6. There is only one direction at the North Pole—south.
7. Scotland Yard is in England.
8. New York’s East River is technically a tidal strait.
9. The largest desert is Antarctica, known as a cold desert. Sand and heat are not essential to deserts. What defines a desert is the amount of precipitation (under ten inches yearly).
10. Both Nevada and a small part of Illinois lie west of the Mississippi River, because Kaskaskia, Illinois, has been west of the Mississippi since a nineteenth-century flood caused the river to cut itself a new channel.
11. Yellowstone Park is in not only Wyoming but also parts of Montana and Idaho.
12. In today’s world, Gaul would describe not only France but also two regions that were inhabited by the Celts: Gallia Cisalpina, or northern Italy, and Gallia Transalpina, the area roughly equivalent to present-day France, including parts of Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.
13. Moscow is in Europe.
14. Excluding Alaskan cities, the largest United States city is not Los Angeles (469.1 square miles, according to The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2009) but Jacksonville, Florida (757.7 square miles), which is larger than not only Los Angeles but also Oklahoma City, Houston, and Phoenix.
15. Reno, Nevada, is farther west than Los Angeles, California.
16. If you headed due south from Detroit, Michigan, the first foreign country you would enter would be Canada.
17. The U.S. state that is the smallest in area is called Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Ironically, the smallest state has the largest official name.
18. The largest lake completely in Canada is Great Bear Lake. Although Superior and Huron are larger than Great Bear Lake, neither is entirely inside Canada. What’s more, Great Bear Lake, in the Northwest Territories, has a total area of more than nineteen thousand square miles, making it larger than the Canadian portions of Lake Superior, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario.
19. A British hamlet was without a church of its own.
20. The world’s largest lake is the Caspian Sea (143,244 square miles, according to The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2009), though Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake.
21. The world’s longest railroad tunnel is not the Channel Tunnel (the Chunnel), which stretches over 31 miles between Cheriton in Kent, England, and Sangatte in northern France. Rather, the world’s longest railroad tunnel is the Seikan Tunnel between the Japanese islands of Honshu and Hokkaido; it spans an impressive 33.46 miles. The Chunnel, however, is the world’s longest underwater tunnel, because it runs 24 miles under the channel. “Only” 14.5 miles of the Seikan Tunnel are underwater.
22. Elba lies off the Italian coast in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
23. The mountain Vinson Massif is in Antarctica.
24. The answer is false; Prague is not east but west of Vienna.
25. The answer is true; Alaska’s Near Islands in the Aleutians are west of Wellington, New Zealand.
26. If you are in Calais, Maine, you are closer to Dublin, Ireland, than you are to San Diego, California. By the way, Calais (the name of the city in Maine) sounds like callus/callous.
27. The answer is true; the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal is, in fact, west of the Pacific end.
28. Great Britain is the largest of the British Isles; it comprises England, Scotland, and Wales.
29. The deepest gorge in the United States is not the Grand Canyon but Hells Canyon of the Snake River between Idaho and Oregon. It is about 7,900 feet deep, about half a mile deeper than the Grand Canyon. The comparison between the two, however, may not be quite fair because the Grand Canyon is a huge hole in the surrounding plateau, whereas Hells Canyon is in mountainous country.
30. Of the countries listed, the only one not in Africa is Suriname, a republic on the northeast coast of South America; it was once a territory of the Netherlands.
31. Technically, Hong Kong is not a city but a “special administrative region” of the People’s Republic of China. Hong Kong contains many islands and cities within it, such as Kowloon, Sha Tin New Town, and Victoria City, which is located on Hong Kong Island. Central District, where the tall buildings are located, is on the northern shore of Hong Kong Island.
32. Death Valley is in both California and Nevada.
33. Bermuda is not in the Caribbean but the Atlantic Ocean, 570 to 580 miles east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and about 1,000 miles north of the Caribbean Sea. Bermuda is not just one island but about three hundred islets. Its weather is moderate because of exposure to the warm Gulf Stream. The temperature in Bermuda ranges from 63°F in the winter to 79°F in the summer.
34. There are no cities in California called “Hollywood.” Hollywood is a district of Los Angeles.
An area that is now part of Los Angeles was settled in the 1880s and named “Hollywood” in 1887 by Mrs. Horace H. Wilcox, wife of an early developer. In 1903, Hollywood was incorporated as a city. In 1910, the residents voted to become part of Los Angeles, and that has been the area’s status ever since.
35. According to WeatherBase.com, London’s average annual precipitation is 29.7 inches, Dallas’s is 33.3 inches, and Washington, DC’s is 39.3 inches, making London the city with the least annual precipitation of the three.
36. The Pentagon is in Arlington, Virginia.
37. There are twenty-seven U.S. states located partly or wholly north of the southernmost part of Canada: Alaska (wholly), California, Connecticut, Idaho (wholly), Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine (wholly), Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota (wholly), Montana (wholly), Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire (wholly), New York, North Dakota (wholly), Ohio, Oregon (wholly), Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota (wholly), Utah, Vermont (wholly), Washington (wholly), Wisconsin (wholly), and Wyoming.
38. Branding cattle did not begin in the American West but in Connecticut, where a 1644 law required that all cattle and swine be earmarked or branded and that the marks should be registered.
39. The Sierra Nevada mountain range is in California.
40. The largest non-Alaskan national park in the United States is Death Valley National Park, which spans 3.4 million acres and is almost five times larger than its neighbor Yosemite. Hemmed in by nine mountains, Death Valley is a place of extremes, where a record high temperature of 134°F was recorded in 1913, and a ground temperature of 201°F has been recorded. It is also extreme in elevation: from 282 feet below sea level to 11,049 feet above, at the top of Telescope Peak. In short, Death Valley is the lowest, driest, and hottest location in the United States.
41. At eight thousand feet, Antarctica has the highest average elevation. The continent is about twice the size of Australia; its ice constitutes about 70 percent of the world’s freshwater and 90 percent of the world’s ice. Although 98 percent of Antarctica is ice, there is land beneath the ice, distinguishing the continent from the Arctic, which lies atop water. Antarctica’s highest mountain, Vinson Massif, is more than sixteen thousand feet tall, higher than the highest peak in the Swiss Alps. With a mean temperature of 20°F below that of the Arctic, Antarctica is the coldest place on earth—a place where a temperature of -128°F was once recorded. (Lower temperatures, close to absolute zero, have been artificially created in labs.) Besides being the driest, coldest, and iciest continent, Antarctica is also the windiest continent, a place where there are often winds up to two hundred miles per hour.
42. The Netherlands is a country with twelve provinces, two of which (Noord-Holland, or North Holland, and Zuid-Holland, or South Holland) were created in 1840; Holland constitutes the northwestern portion of the Netherlands. Noord-Holland contains Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands, and Zuid-Holland contains The Hague, the seat of government. Netherlands, by the way, means “low countries,” and Holland means “wooded land.” What we now call “the Netherlands” was called “the Napoleonic Kingdom of Holland” only between 1806 and 1810.
43. The Panama Canal does not receive ocean water; sitting about eighty-five feet above sea level, the water in the Panama Canal is freshwater, flowing from streams and lakes into Gatun Lake, which is formed by a dam on the Chagres River. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans receive freshwater from the canal. A set of water-filled chambers, the Gatun Locks, lift ships entering from the Atlantic Ocean. The Pedro Miguel Locks and the Miraflores Locks lift ships entering from the Pacific Ocean.
44. The first skyscraper in America was the Home Insurance Building constructed in 1884 in Chicago, not New York City.
45. The largest lake in the world is the Caspian Sea. The largest enclosed body of water, the Caspian Sea has a surface area of more than 140,000 square miles. Bounded by southern Russia, western Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, northern Iran, and eastern Azerbaijan, the Caspian Sea has a maximum depth of about 3,363 feet. By the way, the world’s largest freshwater lake by surface area is Lake Superior, whereas Russia’s Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake, is the largest freshwater lake by volume, containing more water than all the North American Great Lakes combined but less than a third of the water in the Caspian Sea.
46. The largest sand desert is not the Sahara, which is largely rock, but the Great Arabian Desert (or Rub-al-Khali) in the Arabian peninsula.
47. The largest city park in the United States is not New York’s Central Park, which is 843 acres, but Phoenix’s South Mountain Park, which is about nineteen times larger than Central Park and features fifty-eight miles of trails for cycling, hiking, and horseback riding.
48. Most of the gold held in the United States is not at Fort Knox, Kentucky, but in the Federal Reserve vault at Wall Street in New York. Most of the gold there, however, does not belong to the United States but instead belongs to foreign accounts.
49. The Plains of Abraham are nowhere near Israel but are a historic 108-acre plateau within Battlefields Park in Quebec City, Canada; the landmark is named after Abraham Martin (1589-1664), a fisherman and river pilot who brought his animals to graze there.
50. The Battle of the Alamo was over the Republic of Texas, which included not only present-day Texas but also parts of New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming.
Quiz 7
American History
1. Of what were George Washington’s dentures made?
2. Who was the youngest president of the United States?
3. On what hill did the Battle of Bunker Hill occur?
4. Who led the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War?
5. What was the name of the Confederate ironclad ship that fought the Union ironclad ship the Monitor on March 9, 1862?
6. Where was the American Civil War battle Shiloh fought?
7. What was George Armstrong Custer’s rank during the Battle of Little Big Horn?
8. In which U.S. state can the oldest seat of Western government be found?
9. Who led the Indians in the battle of Little Bighorn?
10. What is the full title of the person who serves as the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court?
11. What was the main reason the United States began gasoline rationing in 1942?
12. Until 1796, George Washington celebrated his birthday on what date?
13. Why was the Mason-Dixon line drawn?
14. What was Billy the Kid’s real name?
15. Of the twenty-three nineteenth-century U.S. presidents, were there four, eight, or ten former military generals?
16. What was the longest war fought by the United States?
17. From President George Washington to President Barack Obama, how many individuals have been U.S. presidents?
18. What was the usual method of executing witches in Salem, Massachusetts?
19. Where were the first shots of the U.S. Civil War fired?
20. How much did Peter Minuit pay for Manhattan Island when he bought it from the Indians in 1626?
21. What was the verdict in the Lizzie Borden murder trial?
22. How many U.S. presidents have been impeached?
23. Between 1920 and 1933, what did American Prohibition prohibit?
24. Why did Ethan Allen (1738-1789) originally organize the Green Mountain Boys?
25. In the 1960s and 1970s, what did some feminists do with their bras?
26. Why was the Pentagon built with about twice as many bathrooms as would have been expected for a building of its size?
27. Most of the loss of life and property during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was due to what?
28. Why was Andrew Jackson called Old Hickory?
29. Roughly, how often did President Franklin D. Roosevelt deliver his famous fireside radio chats?
30. What was the name of the aviation sector of the U.S. Army during World War II?
31. Why did American colonists participate in the
Boston Tea Party?
32. Who wrote George Washington’s farewell address?
33. In 1837, the U.S. Postal Service adopted a seal showing a horse and rider. What, specifically, was the seal depicting?
34. Who was President Lincoln’s first choice to command the Union army?
35. During Paul Revere’s midnight ride through the Boston countryside on April 18, 1775, what warning did he shout?
36. What kind of hat did Daniel Boone wear?
37. What colors and styles of clothes did American Pilgrims wear?
38. How many U.S. states rejected the Prohibition Amendment (the 18th Amendment)?
39. When FDR ran against President Hoover, how did FDR criticize his opponent’s handling of the Great Depression?
40. Which state describes itself as Land of Opportunity?
Quiz 7 Answers
American History
1. George Washington’s false teeth were not made of wood but of hippopotamus and elephant ivory held together with gold springs. Real human teeth and bits of horse and donkey teeth were inserted into an ivory plate. By the way, his dentures are on display in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of History and Technology in Washington, DC.
2. The youngest person to become president of the United States was not John F. Kennedy, who was forty-three at the time of his inauguration in 1961, but Theodore Roosevelt, who was forty-two on the day he became president in 1901 after the assassination of President William McKinley. Although John F. Kennedy was the youngest person ever elected president, Theodore Roosevelt was the youngest person ever to hold the office.
3. The Battle of Bunker Hill was not fought at Bunker Hill, but at Breed’s Hill, which was near Bunker Hill but steeper and closer to the British. What’s more, Breed’s Hill was then not in Boston but in Charlestown, Massachusetts, an independent town until Boston annexed it in 1874. William Prescott, famous for reportedly commanding his troops not to fire until they saw the whites of the enemy’s eyes, defended Bunker Hill by fortifying Breed’s Hill. Even though the British won the battle, they lost about one thousand men, boosting the colonists’ morale. (By the way, Prescott might have mentioned the whites of the enemies’ eyes, but some people ascribe the statement to Prescott’s colleague General Israel [“Old Put”] Putnam. An 1849 history of the battle lists that statement as a command given in the battle but does not ascribe it to anyone in particular.)
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