22. In what discipline did parapsychological researcher Dr. J. B. Rhine receive his graduate degree?
23. What’s the radiance surrounding the head or figure of saints in paintings?
24. What is the name of James Whistler’s most famous painting, which is of his mother?
25. What did the artist van Gogh do to one of his ears?
26. In May 1970, which Americans were more likely to disapprove of the Vietnam War, those in their twenties or those ages fifty or older?
27. What was the original reason for brides’ carrying bouquets of strong-smelling herbs, garlic, and chives?
28. When is Boxing Day celebrated as a holiday in parts of the British Commonwealth, during which Christmas gifts are given to service workers?
29. From what is a camel-hair brush made?
30. From what wood was Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose made?
31. What is rice paper made from?
32. What’s in German silver?
33. In the 1931 movie Frankenstein, what is the name of the monster?
34. In what month was the famous Christmas movie Miracle on 34th Street released in 1947?
35. Who sketched and animated Mickey Mouse?
36. What movie star said “Drop the gun, Louie”?
37. What actor said “Judy, Judy, Judy!”?
38. In the United States, is it possible to be legally tried twice for the same action?
39. What is true about a United States ship captain’s legal right to conduct weddings?
40. How many phone calls may one make from a U.S. jail?
41. How might one distinguish an attorney from an attorney-at-law?
42. What make of motorcycle did Marlon Brando have in the film The Wild One?
Quiz 19 Answers
Hodgepodge
1. The white rhinoceros, like the black rhinoceros, is gray-brown. “White,” a corruption of the Afrikaans word wijd (“wide”), refers to the animal’s lips. The black rhinoceros is distinguished by its pointed upper lip, which it uses for browsing on thorny bushes. The white rhinoceros, however, feeds on grass.
2. The usual color of mourning in the Far East, in ancient Rome, and in Sparta was white.
3. If you are livid, you are not red but ashen.
4. Many Model T Fords came in black, though the cars originally came in other colors, such as Brewster green, red, blue, and gray. In fact, during its first year, Model T Fords weren’t available in black at all but only in gray, red, and green. It is often said that Ford chose black because the paint dried faster than other paints available at the time, and a faster drying paint would speed production time. The fact is that more than thirty types of black paint were used to paint different parts of the Model T, and the different paints had different drying times. Ford engineering documents suggest that the color black was chosen because it was inexpensive and durable. No one, by the way, can conclusively prove that Henry Ford ever said that the buying public could have Model T Fords in any color, so long as it was black, but we do know that from 1914 to 1925 all Model Ts came only in black.
5. Black bears are usually black but possibly white or cream (as on Kermode Island and its vicinity in British Columbia), or brown, or cinnamon (in south-central Alaska and the southeastern mainland) or blue or glacier (in the Yakutat area of southeast Alaska). In fact, about 20 percent of black bears are not black. A black bear, by the way, can have a patch of white on its chest. Black bears, the smallest of the three species of North American bears, are also the most abundant and widely distributed and are seen in every state except Hawaii.
6. The Vikings wore helmets, but the helmets were not horned. Horned helmets were used in Celtic religious rituals but were unsuitable for combat because the horns could have been easily caught on weapons. The imagery of horned Vikings is thought to stem from nineteenth-century Scandinavism, a romantic nationalist movement.
7. The color of the black box is orange, which is much easier to see than black, especially among wreckage.
8. Pirates did not dispose of their captives by making the captives walk the plank (a myth) but by throwing them overboard.
9. The sound that occurs after the thumb and middle finger are snapped is caused not by the forceful connection of the thumb and the middle finger but by the middle finger’s striking the base of thumb.
10. Wilbur Wright was not born in Ohio but Millville, Indiana; his brother, Orville, was born in Dayton, Ohio. Ohio is sometimes called the Birthplace of Aviation.
11. A bit part is a small role for a supporting actor, calling for at least one line of a dialogue. A cameo (or cameo appearance) is a brief appearance of a famous person (often not an actor) in a movie, play, or TV show, as in Alfred Hitchcock’s cameos in more than thirty of his movies. An extra is an anonymous person appearing in a nonspeaking role, usually in the background as a pedestrian, a patron of a restaurant, or a person sitting on a bench. A walk-on is marginally more important than an extra because a walk-on is clearly seen, usually performing some easily identifiable action, such as taking an order at a restaurant or writing someone a parking ticket.
12. St. Bernards have never carried brandy barrels around their necks. Before they were trained as rescue dogs, St. Bernards carried food for the monks at the hospice in the Great St. Bernard Pass, the alpine route linking Switzerland to Italy. The mistaken belief that St. Bernards carry brandy can be traced to a Victorian painter of landscapes and animals named Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-1873), who painted a scene called Alpine Mastiff: Reanimating a Distressed Traveler, which features two St. Bernards, one of which carried a miniature brandy barrel around its neck, added “for interest.” Although the monastery has come to use helicopters rather than St. Bernards to rescue people, it is estimated that the dogs have made more than 25,000 rescues since 1800.
13. The digits zero and one remain without letters on telephones because they are flag numbers, kept for special purposes, such as emergencies or operator services.
14. The substance responsible for the death of one in ten adults worldwide is tobacco. If figures continue to rise at current levels, tobacco use and consequent smoking-related diseases will become the leading cause of unnatural deaths in the world by 2030, when tobacco is predicted to be implicated in the deaths of about ten million people a year.
15. Strictly speaking, the word igloo (or iglu) does not necessarily designate a rounded Eskimo house made from blocks of ice; rather, the word means “house” in Inuit. Most igloos are made of stone or hide. The precursors of the Inuit, the Thule, did live in snow-block igloos, which were used in central and eastern Canada. Although Canadian Eskimos built igloos from snow, snow-block igloos are not built in Alaska. Few, in fact, exist anywhere today.
16. The large, branched candlestick is called a candela-brum , not a candelabra (a plural form that would describe two or more).
17. The main reason covered bridges were preferred to ordinary bridges was to protect the bridge from exposure to the elements, not to protect travelers. Early bridges were often made of wood, making them more likely to deteriorate within only ten years. Covering them protected their structural members, extending their usefulness for decades.
18. The deadliest maritime disaster was not the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, which killed more than 1,500 people, but the sinking of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, a German passenger ship sunk by a Russian submarine in 1945 in the Baltic Sea, killing at least 5,000 people and possibly more than 9,000. The Russians sank the ship, which was evacuating civilian refugees, German soldiers, and U-boat personnel surrounded by the Red Army in what was then East Prussia.
19. Strictly speaking, people cannot cure or mend split ends by applying some hair care product, though they can get haircuts or shave their heads. Once the cuticle of the hair shaft is split, it can often grow split, but it cannot be mended. What some hair care products do is not mend split ends but soften hair texture by using fillers that attach to the hair shaft.
20. It is false that the U.S.
Interstate Highway System was designed so that every five (or ten) miles can accommodate emergency or military aircraft landings. Although the federal government is capable of wastefulness, it is unlikely that legislators behind the highway system would have supported interrupting the flow of troops, supplies, and civilians during domestic crises to land planes, especially when a large number of major airports, private airstrips, military airstrips, or American aircraft carriers could be used for the same purpose. Richard Weingroff, information liaison specialist for the Federal Highway Administration’s Office of Infrastructure and its unofficial historian, asserts that the closest the myth came to reality occurred in 1944, when Congress briefly considered funding emergency landing strips in the Federal Highway-Aid Act, authorizing a National System of Interstate Highways. The highways themselves were never considered potential airstrips; rather, the proposed landing strips would have been built alongside major highways, enabling ground transportation to and from the strips. The proposal, however, was dropped. Many people who believe in the one-mile-in-five assertion claim that it was part of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, committing the federal government to build what became the 42,800-mile Interstate Highway System (officially called the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways). That act did not, however, specify anything related to emergency landing strips, nor did it mention any one-mile-in-five requirements.
21. Albert Einstein received his Nobel Prize in physics not for the theory of relativity, published sixteen years earlier, but for Einstein’s lesser-known work on the photoelectric effect of light.
22. Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine, who founded the parapsychology lab at Duke University and the Journal of Parapsychology , earned his graduate degree in botany, not psychology.
23. The radiance surrounding the head or figure of saints in paintings is not a halo but a nimbus. The word halo is a general term for any disc or luminosity (including the ring seen around the sun during an eclipse); the word nimbus specifically refers to the radiance surrounding godlike figures walking the Earth.
24. The official name of James Whistler’s most famous painting is not Whistler’s Mother but Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother, which he later renamed Portrait of My Mother.
25. Van Gogh did not cut off his entire ear or even most of it; he cut off an earlobe and a bit more. On Christmas Eve, 1888, he grabbed a razor and chased the painter Gauguin, with whom van Gogh was having strained relations and arguing. Van Gogh ended up using the razor on himself, according to him, because of remorse, though possibly also or alternatively to relieve his tinnitus (ringing in the ear). After cutting off the lobe and a bit more, he wrapped the severed body part in a newspaper and gave it to a local prostitute he loved named Rachel, whom he asked to take good care of it. As a result of van Gogh’s irrational violence, Gauguin never spoke with him again, and the authorities placed van Gogh in an asylum.
26. Although many young people in the 1960s were vocally opposed to the Vietnam War and demonstrated against it, opinion polling in the United States showed that younger people were more likely to support sending United States troops to Vietnam than older people were. According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, by May 1970, 49 percent of young people thought that the Vietnam War was a mistake, whereas, 61 percent of those age fifty or older thought that it was a mistake, and 53 percent of those age thirty to forty-nine believed that it was a mistake. In short, even during the height of anti-Vietnam sentiment, Americans fifty or older were more likely to disapprove of the war than those under thirty.
27. The original reason brides carried bouquets of strong-smelling herbs, garlic, and chives was to ward off evil spirits.
28. Boxing Day is not necessarily December 26, but the first weekday after Christmas, which can be December 26 or later.
29. A camel-hair brush does not use camel hair but the hair of any number of other animals, including goats, squirrels, sheep, bears, and ponies.
30. The Spruce Goose was not made from spruce but from birch. The name Spruce Goose was commonly given to several all-wood airplanes. Although many news reports and airplane enthusiasts liked the term for Hughes’s plane, he did not. Built at a reported cost of $40 million and designed to carry several hundred soldiers, the huge plane flew only one time (November 2, 1947), for about one thousand yards at a height of seventy feet.
31. Rice paper (or pith paper) comes not from rice but from the pith of the so-called rice paper plant (Tetrapanax papyriferus).
32. German silver is not silver but an alloy of mostly copper, zinc, and nickel.
33. The name of the monster in the 1931 movie was not Frankenstein, the creator’s name. In the movie Frankenstein , the monster has no name.
34. The Christmas movie Miracle on 34th Street was originally released not in December but in July. Neither the producer Darryl F. Zanuck nor the other 20th Century executives intended it to be a Christmas movie.
35. The person who sketched and animated Mickey Mouse was not Walt Disney but Ub Iwerks, Disney’s chief animator in the early days of the studio.
36. Nobody, including Humphrey Bogart, in Casablanca, ever said, “Drop the gun, Louie.” Instead, Bogart said, “Not so fast, Louie.”
37. No actor seriously said in a movie, “Judy, Judy, Judy,” but Cary Grant did say, in the 1939 Only Angels Have Wings, “Hello Judy,” “Come on, Judy,” and “Now, Judy.” In the 1938 movie, Bringing Up Baby, Cary Grant does say “Susan, Susan, Susan.”
38. People can be tried twice for the same act if the act violated both federal and state law. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits double jeopardy in federal cases. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, in 1922 held that someone could be tried in federal court for a federal offense and then in state court for a state statute. Note also, by the way, that the double jeopardy prohibition didn’t apply to O.J. Simpson’s situation because he received only one criminal trial for homicide; the other trial involving homicide was a civil trial. O.J. Simpson couldn’t legally be retried, in a criminal court, for the charges of homicide, of which he had already been acquitted.
39. U.S. ship captains may not perform weddings unless they are specifically authorized to do so because of their being priests, rabbis, ministers, judges, or justices of the peace. Indeed, some U.S. maritime regulations prohibit ship captains from conducting wedding ceremonies.
40. Americans in jail are entitled to make as many as they need to get in touch with lawyers and to conduct legal matters.
41. Strictly speaking, an attorney need not be an attorney-at-law but is someone legally authorized to act on behalf of another, as in power-of-attorney. A person authorized to make medical decisions on behalf of another can be said to be an attorney. An attorney-at-law is someone professionally trained in the law who is authorized to give legal advice or represent another in court. An attorney who is a lawyer is an attorney-at-law.
42. The motorcycle Marlon Brando had in The Wild One was a 1950 Triumph 6T Thunderbird, not a Harley-Davidson, the make Lee Marvin had.
Quiz 20
Botany
1. On what sort of plant do bananas grow?
2. What is the common name of the flower known as fleur-de-lis (lys)?
3. What are coffee beans?
4. What liquid is inside a coconut?
5. Of blackberries, strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries, which are true berries?
6. Of the following plants, which are not seeds—peanuts, navy beans, rice, corn, or tapioca?
7. What happens when you scratch skin with poison ivy and then touch another part of your body?
8. How often do century plants bloom?
9. What is the world’s oldest single living organism?
10. What is misleading about the proposition that autumn leaves change color from green to yellow and orange?
Quiz 20 Answers
Botany
1. Bananas do not grow on trees but on
very large herbs, which contain no roots and have woodless “trunks” consisting of false stems made up of large sheaths wrapped together.
2. The fleur-de-lis is not a lily (as commonly thought) but an iris.
3. Coffee beans are not beans, which are the seeds or pods of certain leguminous plants used mainly for food, but are the seeds or pits of a red, cherry-like fruit.
4. The liquid inside a coconut is not coconut milk, which is produced from boiling the white coconut meat with water and straining it, but coconut water, which is full of vitamins and minerals and has the same balance of salts as human blood.
5. Of the fruits mentioned, only blueberries are true berries. Blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries are aggregated drupes. Drupes are fleshy fruits containing a single stone or pit. The fruits mentioned are called aggregated drupes because each individual fruit is a cluster of miniature drupes (bumpy bits making up the fruit).
6. Of the plants listed, the only one that does not consist of seeds is the tapioca, which is made from the root of the cassava plant.
7. The symptoms of poison ivy aren’t spread by scratching the body. Some parts of the body can show symptoms before other parts, but the difference in the appearance of those symptoms is due to the variable thickness of the skin. It takes more time for the plant’s toxic oil to soak into areas of thicker skin. What’s more, the liquid in poison ivy blisters doesn’t contain the toxic oil. Consequently, you can’t spread poison ivy by breaking blisters. Because it takes about fifteen minutes for the oil to soak into the surface of the skin, you’d do well to wash your skin with soap and water as soon as possible after exposure.
8. The succulent known as the century plant belongs to the genus Agave. Although it blooms infrequently, it doesn’t require a hundred years. Plants belonging to the Agave family can bloom in various spans of time, depending on the species. Some may bloom in one year; some may bloom in as many as fifty years; still others may take more or less time to bloom.
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