12. The most common main ingredient in mock turtle soup is a calf’s head.
13. Buttermilk contains zero percent butter.
14. The English muffin was invented in America. In New York, about 1800, Samuel Bath Thomas, a baker who had emigrated from England, gave English muffins their name.
15. If by hamburger, one means the food that consists of a meat patty and a bun, the United States most likely originated it. Hamburg, Germany, however, originated a Hamburg steak (later called a Hamburger steak) during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The meat originally had no bun.
16. Mayonnaise is a dressing that consists of raw egg yolks, oil, lemon juice or vinegar, and spices; Miracle Whip, which debuted at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, consists of mayonnaise blended with cheaper dressings, more than twenty spices, high-fructose corn syrup, and sugar.
17. Welsh rabbit, as indicated in question 10, is no more a species of rabbit than a decoy duck is a species of duck; the expression Welsh rabbit became mangled by some people into Welsh rarebit, which describes the same thing, to wit, melted cheese on toast.
18. Green olives, unlike black olives, have been picked before they’re ripe.
19. Black tea leaves have been completely fermented before being dried; oolong tea leaves have been only partly fermented before being dried.
20. Both cocoa and chocolate are derived from the seeds of a tropical tree called Theobroma cacao. After the seeds or beans are roasted, shelled, and ground, they cool in pans, producing, at first, a paste and then solid bars, consisting partly of a fat called cocoa butter. The combination of cocoa butter and cocoa is what we call chocolate. If the paste is put into pressured containers, the fat separates from the mixture, producing cocoa.
Quiz 9
Science
1. From what metal is tin foil made?
2. In what part of your body does most digestion occur?
3. What is petrified wood?
4. What shape is a raindrop?
5. What shape is the Earth?
6. What causes tidal waves?
7. What, if anything, distinguishes a cranium from a skull?
8. What are icebergs?
9. If you threw dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) into a fire, what would happen?
10. Which metal or metals are liquid at room temperature?
11. What makes champagne fizz?
12. What element is the best conductor of heat and electricity?
13. In producing echoes, is there anything unique about a duck’s quack?
14. What is true about pet fur and allergies?
15. What is one hearing when one places a seashell next to an ear?
16. Is it possible to swallow food while standing on one’s head?
17. Ecologically speaking, which is worse (all things considered) for the environment, paper or plastic bags?
18. What is the red liquid that oozes out of a very rare steak?
19. When is mammal blood blue?
20. What is true about the human tongue’s ability to detect different tastes in its different regions?
Quiz 9 Answers
Science
1. Tin foil is made not from tin but from aluminum.
2. Most digestion occurs not in the stomach, which stores food and reduces it to a pulpy mass, but in the small intestine.
3. Petrified wood is not wood that has become stone but wood in which mineral water fills cells, replacing the original fibers until the whole log structure has become solid stone. In other words, petrified wood isn’t wood but stone, even though it shows the details of the original wood.
4. A raindrop is not teardrop shaped but spherical.
5. The shape of the Earth is not that of an ordinary sphere; rather, the Earth is an oblate spheroid, meaning that it bulges at the equator and is flattened at the poles, making the length of the equator slightly greater than the distance around via the North Pole and the South Pole.
6. Tidal waves are caused not by tides but by underwater disturbances, such as earthquakes, landslides, or volcanic activity. To avoid confusion, many scientists prefer the word tsunami to the word tidal wave.
7. The cranium is the part of the skull enclosing the brain, consisting of all the bones of the skull except one, the inferior maxillary, or mandible (the lower jaw).
8. Icebergs are not frozen ocean water but masses of ice broken off from glaciers or ice sheets, formed from snow that has been compressed into ice by its own weight over thousands of years.
9. Dry ice thrown into a fire wouldn’t melt but would sublime, meaning that it would change directly into a gas.
10. Although many people know that mercury (the stuff in some thermometers) is liquid at room temperature, fewer people know that the metals gallium (Ga), caesium (Cs), and francium (Fr) can also be liquids at or near room temperature.
11. Champagne fizzes not because of carbon dioxide but because of dirt, dust, or lint. Because carbon dioxide molecules would evaporate invisibly in a completely smooth, clean glass, scientists used to think that the slight imperfections in the glass enabled bubbles to form. New photographic evidence, however, reveals that the nicks and grooves in a glass are too small for bubbles to latch on to. Instead, it is the microscopic particles of dust in the glass that enable bubbles to form. The dirt or dust in the glass acts as condensation nuclei for the dissolved carbon dioxide.
12. Although many people think that copper is the best conductor of heat and electricity, silver actually is. Copper, the second most conductive element, is used in electrical equipment because it is much cheaper than silver.
13. Contrary to a popular misconception, a duck’s quack will produce an echo, though it may be difficult for us to hear it in some circumstances.
14. Normally, people who have allergic reactions around pets aren’t allergic to fur but to pet dander (dead skin flakes), saliva, or urine/droppings. Regularly washing pets can often reduce allergic reactions.
15. The sound that appears to be originating from inside the shell is the sound of our own blood rushing through veins in the ear, coupled with the echoes of nearby sounds. Any cup-shaped object can produce the effect.
16. It is possible to swallow food while standing on one’s head. Contrary to popular belief, food does not simply fall down the esophagus as a person swallows, but food is gradually pulled down the ten-inch passage to the stomach. Swallowing is a complex act in which food moves from the mouth to the stomach. The process does not work simply by gravity but involves constrictive and peristaltic waves that move food down the esophagus in rhythmic muscular contractions. Gravity can, though, speed up the process, as can be seen when liquids are swallowed more rapidly than solids.
17. Although both plastic bags and paper bags are environmentally inferior to reusable canvas bags, plastic bags, all things considered, are better than paper bags. For example, the manufacturing process to produce paper bags requires much more energy than that required for producing plastic bags. What’s more, manufacturing paper bags produces more greenhouse gases, acid rain, and water pollutants than are produced by manufacturing plastic bags. Still further, recycling paper bags requires much more energy than that required for recycling plastic bags. Moreover, paper bags take up more space than plastic bags in a landfill. True, paper bags degrade much faster than plastic ones, and plastic bags can threaten wildlife. Nonetheless, there are more environmental negatives associated with paper bags than with plastic ones.
18. The red liquid that oozes out of a very rare steak isn’t blood, but myoglobin, a relative of blood. Myoglobin is a single-chain globular protein that is structurally related to hemoglobin. Hemoglobin conveys oxygen through the body by the bloodstream. Because many animals need oxygen in the muscles faster than the circulatory system can deliver it, they store myoglobin in their muscles. If an animal is running away from a predator, the muscles use the myoglobin while hemoglobin is en route. Almost all the blood in a very rare steak has already been removed before the steak is del
ivered to the market.
19. Mammal blood is not ever blue but is bright red or scarlet (when it is oxygenated) or a darker red (when it is not oxygenated). True, veins make blood appear blue through the skin but that appearance is due to a phenomenon known as Rayleigh scattering, the same effect that is responsible for apparently blue skies. Rayleigh scattering, named after the English physicist Lord Rayleigh, is the elastic scattering of light or other electromagnetic radiation by particles much smaller than the wavelength of light.
20. Different tastes can be detected by taste buds on all parts of the tongue. The belief in a “tongue map” stems from a mistranslation by a Harvard psychologist of a discredited German paper written in 1901. Yes, we may have increased sensitivity to certain qualities in certain areas of our tongues, but we perceive all taste qualities all over our tongues.
Quiz 10
Literature
1. In Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, what was the name of the monster?
2. Within 20 percent, what percentage of the protagonists in Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches novels become millionaires?
3. In Longfellow’s words “the village smithy stands,” what does smithy describe?
4. Tennyson wrote in the poem “In Memoriam” the following words: “’Tis better to have loved and lost / than never to have love at all.” What sort of love was he describing?
5. “This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.” Who wrote those words?
6. Who was Phineas Fogg?
7. Who was the first person to say or write “Ignorance is bliss”?
8. Who was the first to say or write “Alas! Poor Yorick. I knew him well”?
9. The word wherefore in “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” means what?
10. In L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, what were Dorothy’s shoes made of?
11. According to Ian Fleming’s novels and short stories, which alcoholic beverage does James Bond consume most often?
12. What is the color of the original Oompa-Loompas in Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?
13. The 1865 story “Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates” relates how a fifteen-year-old Dutch boy, Hans Brinker, saves his town by plugging a leaky dike with his finger. In what country did the story originate?
14. What was the official name for the schoolbook popularly known as McGuffey’s Reader?
15. What was the original title of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1320)?
16. What sort of hat did Sherlock Holmes wear?
17. Who wrote Grimm’s Fairy Tales?
18. To whom did F. Scott Fitzgerald address the remark that the rich are very different from you and me?
19. During his lifetime, what was Noah Webster’s bestselling book?
20. Where did Abraham Lincoln write the Gettysburg Address?
Quiz 10 Answers
Literature
1. The name of the monster in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel was not “Frankenstein” (which was the name of the monster’s creator, Victor Frankenstein) but “Adam,” which is also the traditional name of the first man.
2. Zero percent of Horatio Alger’s protagonists became millionaires, though many of them became financially respectable.
3. Smithy does not designate a blacksmith but a blacksmith’s shop. In fact, in the same poem, Longfellow writes, “The smith a mighty man is he,” making it clear that the smithy is the shop, and the smith is the blacksmith.
4. Tennyson was not describing a romantic heterosexual love. Tennyson was describing the profoundly deep friendship he had with Arthur Hallam, who had died at twenty-two. Tennyson met Hallam at Cambridge University and found in Hallam a kind of father figure he might have missed at home. His father took up the ministry because he had been disinherited and ended up a drunkard. One of Tennyson’s brothers was a drug addict, and another spent his life in a mental hospital. Queen Victoria was so impressed by “In Memoriam” that Tennyson was appointed poet laureate.
5. Contrary to popular opinion, the author of “This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel” was not George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) but Horace Walpole (1717-1797).
6. Phineas Fogg is probably someone mistaken for the hero of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, whose name is Phileas Fogg.
7. The first person to say “Ignorance is bliss” was probably the first person to misquote the poet Thomas Gray, who, in “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” wrote, “where ignorance is bliss, ’Tis folly to be wise.”
8. The first person to say or write “Alas! Poor Yorick. I knew him well” was probably the first person to misquote Hamlet, who said: “Alas! Poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.”
9. Wherefore does not mean “where” but “why.” The famous line from Romeo and Juliet is spoken by Juliet during the balcony scene. She is lamenting the antagonism between her family (the Capulets) and Romeo’s family (the Montagues). Juliet is asking, “Romeo, why did you have to be a Montague?”
10. In the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s shoes were not made of rubies, as in the movie, but made of silver. Noel Langley, a Hollywood screenwriter, changed them to rubies for the film The Wizard of Oz. By the way, the book doesn’t contain Miss Gulch, the farm-hands, or Professor Marvel in Kansas. In fact, Dorothy actually goes to Oz and doesn’t meet the Wicked Witch until she gets to the witch’s castle.
11. According to Ian Fleming’s writings (as revealed at AtomicMartinis.com), James Bond’s favorite alcoholic beverage isn’t a vodka martini (shaken not stirred) but bourbon. Of the 317 drinks consumed, Bond drank 37 bourbons, 10 bourbon and branch waters, and 7 bourbon and sodas, but only 19 vodka martinis.
12. The original Oompa-Loompas were black, not orange. In the first edition of the novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Oompa-Loompas were a tribe of black pygmies imported by Mr. Wonka from “the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before,” to replace the white workers who were let go. The Oompa-Loompas came to live on chocolate but originally ate “beetles, eucalyptus leaves, caterpillars, and the bark of the bong-bong tree.” In the early 1970s, Roald Dahl’s U.S. publisher, Knopf, insisted that the Oompa-Loompas be redescribed because their original description appeared to have overtones of slavery and seemed close to racism. In 1972, there appeared a revised edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which the Oompa-Loompas were not black pygmies but were closer to little hippies with “golden-brown hair” and “rosy-white skin.” Later, they were depicted as futuristic punks with Mohawk haircuts. In the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the Oompa-Loompas appear as orange elves. The 2005 movie has a different title and the Oompa-Loompas in it aren’t unambiguously orange.
13. Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, written by Mary Mapes Dodge, originated in the United States. The story did, however, spread to the Netherlands, where there is a statue honoring the fictitious hero.
14. The official name of the schoolbook popularly known as McGuffey’s Reader was McGuffey’s Eclectic Reader.
15. The original title of the Divine Comedy was just Comedy (Commedia) in Italian. Later, the author and poet Giovanni Boccaccio added the word divine (divina).
16. Although the deerstalker hat is almost a trademark of Sherlock Holmes, he never wore one. Nowhere in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s four novels and fifty-six stories is the hat mentioned. In fact, the deerstalker, appropriate for rural people (especially hunters), would not suit the fashion-conscious urbanite Sherlock Holmes. Designed by the detective himself, Holmes’s hat is not a traditional deerstalker. The mistaken belief that Holmes wore such a hat can be traced to Sidney Paget, the illustrator of Strand Magazine. Paget, who liked deerstalkers and would at times wear them, produced drawings—inaccurately—depicting Holmes wearing the hat.
17. The inventors of Grimm’s Fairy Tales were not Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.
The Grimm’s brothers simply compiled traditional fairy tales from previously published collections and recorded folklore told by peasant storytellers.
18. The words about the rich were not in an actual conversation between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway or between any two actual persons; rather, the words are from the unnamed narrator of Fitzgerald’s short story “The Rich Boy.” Many people think that Fitzgerald and Hemingway were talking about the rich in a conversation in which Fitzgerald first asserts that the very rich are different from you (Hemingway) and me (Fitzgerald), and then Hemingway replies, “Yes, they have more money.” Instead, Fitzgerald’s words about the very rich appear in “The Rich Boy,” in the third paragraph:Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical, where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.
The words, then, are not addressed to Hemingway but to the readers of the story. Hemingway, however, connected himself to “The Rich Boy” in August 1936, ten years after Fitzgerald’s story was published in Red-book magazine. In Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” the narrator is a dying writer named Harry, who is presented as remembering “poor Scott Fitzgerald” and “his romantic awe” of the rich. Harry remembers that “someone” had said of the rich, “Yes, they have more money.” Note that Fitzgerald’s statement about the rich and Hemingway’s reply are fictional and appear in two different short stories published a decade apart. Again, and contrary to popular belief, the remarks were not part of an actual conversation between the two authors. After “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” came out, Fitzgerald wrote Hemingway an angry and sad letter, asking the author not to mention him again in his fiction. In reprints of Hemingway’s story, the character Scott Fitzgerald became Julian.
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