by Adrian Berry
10. Which famous scientist concealed his identity from the Nazis under the name of ‘’?
11. Who was the only scientist to have been expelled from the Royal Society of London for infamous conduct?
12. Who invented the terms (a) black hole and (b) Big Bang?
13. What approximate percentage of the atmosphere consists of:
(a) carbon dioxide (b) carbon monoxide (c) nitrogen (d) oxygen (e) ozone (f) methane (g) man-made CFCs?
14. What people inspired ’s creation of Caliban in The Tempest}
15. What two bodies in the solar system are in a ‘double tidal lock’?
16. Why is the largest crater on the Martian moon Phobos named ‘Stickney’?
17. Thirty-six passengers were killed when the airship was destroyed by fire in 1937. How many survived?
18. Europe’s Soho spacecraft, designed to examine the Sun, is on its way to an orbit called L2. What does the L stand for?
19. Why did Napoleon send the message to : ‘Don’t wash, I am coming home!’
20. (a) Where, and (b) how high above sea-level, is the world’s highest mountain-top astronomical observatory?
21. What action did the Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed take when and published his half-written star catalogue without authorization?
Answers to Quizzes
QUIZ NO. 1
1. (a) (c) Jean-Paul Marat
(d) Arthur Eddington (e) Lenin (f) Napoleon (g) St Augustine (h) Macaulay (i) Alfred North Whitehead (j) Bertrand Russell
2. (a) false (b) false (c) true (d) true
3. (f) 362,880
4. In the Middle Ages, there were four sciences in the Quadrivium: arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy; together with three of the Trivium: grammar, rhetoric and logic
5. The two primes are:
730, 141,588, 155,644, 511,360,779,722,065, 841
and
407, 354, 240, 177, 584, 110,037,203,671,316, 079, 261, 132, 643
6. A non-sequitur
7. Arrange the numbers and
letters
thus:
12 3 4
5
6
7
8
9
A B C D
E
F
G
H
I
J K L M
N
O
P
Q
R
S T U V
W
X
Y
z
and read the three letters below 6
8.
9. The Sun
10. (a) the spectra of the stars (b) the first 15 digits of pi, recorded by the length of each word
11. In the core of a supernova, just before its explosion
12. An old Cornish dish of herrings baked in a pie with their heads poking through the crust
13. ‘Tank’ was a First World War code to avoid arousing German suspicions
14. (a) mass concentrations on a planet’s surface
(b) particles with no charge and almost no mass
(c) the compound that makes blood red
(d) nocturnal luminescence caused by the presence of atomic oxygen
(e) regions in the Asteroid Belt where no asteroids are to be found
(f) hydrogen made of anti-matter
(g) theoretical faster-than-light particles
(h) relics of stars whose nuclear reactions have ceased
(i) aggressive, carnivorous dinosaurs
(j) the ability of submarines - and some animals - to ‘see’ by detecting echoes
(k) a message which conceals a secret, second message
15. (a) finding a super-violent flare on a Sun-like star
(b) chairing the awards of the prizes
(c) finding 37 unexplained radio signals from nearby stars
(d) his announcement of new materials that will transform economic life
(e) predicting that advanced computer networks will behave aggressively
(f) helping to repair the Hubble Space Telescope
(g) predicting that a corridor near a black hole can be curved and straight at the same time
(h) trying to prove that Polynesians could have colonized the Americas
16. The scholar seated on a three-legged stool who disputed in the Cambridge Philosophy School on Ash Wednesdays
QUIZ NO. 2
1. (a) (c) Astronomer Royal
Sir Richard Woolley (d) General Leslie Groves, officer commanding the atomic bomb-building project (e) James Barrie (f) Dennis Gunton (g) J.B.S. Haldane (h) Charles de Gaulle (i) Maurice Bowra (j) Francis Bacon (k) Luis Alvarez
2. Because the universe contains stars that are more than 15 billion years old
3. The telephone
4. 80
5. The cracking of a whip
6. The solution to the equation is: A=17, B=21,C=37and D=21
The clue is that B and D must be equal. A computer program can then be run, like this one in BASIC:
10FORA= 1 to 100
20FORC= 1 to 100
30FORD= 1 to 100
40B=D
50 IF AA3+CA3=6*DA3 THEN PRINT A,B,C,D: END
60 NEXT: NEXT: NEXT
7. From the south gate of Karnak in Egypt
8. 23 27’ north and 23 27’ south
9. (a) a parliament of owls (b) an unkindness of ravens (c) an exaltation of larks (d) a den or nest of vipers (e) a colony of rats (f) a crash of rhinoceroses (g) a gang of elks (h) a bed of mussels (i) a troop of monkeys (j) a troubling of goldfish (k) an army of caterpillars (1) a cast of falcons
10. In ancient Egypt, near what is now Port Said
11. For purifying metals, a ‘reducing agent’
12. 1,729 is the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two ways. It is 1 cubed+12 cubed and 9 cubed+10 cubed
13. By making aircraft fly in formation
14. European velociraptor fossils are most likely to be found in the Isle of Wight
15. In space: is an asteroid and Dactyl its moon
16. ‘Dog’ watch is a corruption of’dodge’. It prevents the same men being on duty together each day
17. By immersing a gold crown in his bath, had found that it had been fraudulently alloyed with silver, thereby establishing the law of buoyancy
18. The star Eta Carinae
19. ‘A robot may not harm humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.’ The plot of Prelude to Foundation would not have worked without it
20. It takes a million years for energy generated in the Sun’s core to reach its surface
21. (a) a short valley into a hillside (b) an isolated hill or rock
(c) a volcanic plug (d) a bar connecting an island with the mainland (e) a mountain range (f) a peak projecting through an ice peak (g) that part of the sea shore between high and low tide (h) parallel ranges (i) iron pyrites
22. Noble gases are supposedly too aristocratic to form compounds with the common herd of elements
23.
24. claimed that acquired characteristics in wheat could be inherited
25. Craters filled with ice, which would be invaluable to lunar colonists
26. It is named after the first ship commanded by Captain
QUIZ NO. 3
1. (a) (f) (i) President (j) (k)
2. (a) , Marquis de Laplace (b) Napoleon
3. (a) Sapa is a strong artificial sweetener made from boiled wine (b) It gave women attractive pale complexions and was believed to cause abortions
4. Anti-matter, the ideal fuel for starships
5. (a) ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ - St 22:21
(b) ‘A horse A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ - , Act V, sc. iv.
(c) ‘I am no orator as is.’ -, Act III, sc. ii
(d) ‘I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not yet to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to t
he wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill, but time and chance happeneth to them all’ - Ecclesiastes, 9:11
6. 909,287 and 909,289; 909,299 and 909,301; 909,317 and 909,319; 909,329 and 909,331; 909,341 and 909,343
7. They are both deadly poisons, respectively known as TCDD and VX
8. (a) (c) Sirius (d) Betelgeuse (e) Algol
(f) Aldebaran (g) Mizar (h) Polaris the Pole Star (i) Pollux (j) Alcyone (the brightest star in the Pleiades)
9. The ether wind, which defied all attempts to measure it and which was shown not to exist
10.
11. The geologist , for plundering an art collection
12. (a) A. Wheeler (b) Sir
13. (a) carbon dioxide 0.034 (b) carbon monoxide 0.00002
(c) nitrogen 77 (d) oxygen 20 (e) ozone 0.000003 (f) methane 0.0001 (g) man-made CFCs 0.000000008
14. The natives of Patagonia, discovered by
15. and its moon Charon. One side of each permanently faces the other
16. Crater Stickney on Phobos was named after the wife of the astronomer Asaph Hall, who in 1877 encouraged him in his difficult search for the Martian moons
17. Fifty-six passengers survived the disaster
18. For Joseph,
19. Napoleon was sexually aroused by ’s personal odour
20. (a) The world’s highest mountain-top astronomical observatory is the Denver High Altitude Observatory at Boulder, Colorado (b) It is, at 4,297 metres, slightly higher than Mauna Kea, Hawaii
21. Flamsteed obtained all the copies of his catalogue that he could and burned them in public