The Big Book of American Trivia
Page 24
16. The Jolly Green Giant, standing in Green Giant Park [Back]
17. Vermont, from the French vert mont [Back]
18. New York City [Back]
19. The Blue Ridge [Back]
20. Alabama [Back]
21. South Dakota and Wyoming [Back]
22. The White Mountains [Back]
23. Bryce Canyon [Back]
24. Orange [Back]
25. The Red River (not the same as the one in question 2) [Back]
Funny Names on the Map // Answers
1. Hawaii [Back]
2. Texas; Scurry is a top oil-producing county. [Back]
3. Truth or Consequences, named for a show hosted by Ralph Edwards; the town was originally named Hot Springs. [Back]
4. The Okefenokee [Back]
5. Kentucky; it’s a state park in the southwestern part of the state. [Back]
6. Florida; they are towns on the Atlantic Coast. [Back]
7. In northern Alabama; the residents of Winston County voted to secede from Alabama after the state seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy. Winston County became (never officially) the state of Nickajack. [Back]
8. New Orleans, of course [Back]
9. Lake Okeechobee [Back]
10. On a Civil War battlefield; Chick-Chatt is the short name for Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park in Tennessee and Georgia. [Back]
11. The Amish [Back]
12. The Moose (Did anyone miss this?) [Back]
13. Pittsburgh; both give excellent views of the city. [Back]
14. Sand dunes, which many people use for hang gliding [Back]
15. Michigan; some of the large dunes supposedly resemble sleeping bears. [Back]
16. Maryland [Back]
17. Muscle Shoals [Back]
18. Louisiana, noted for its French connections [Back]
19. Sweden; it was settled by a Swedish religious sect. Bishopskuna means “Bishop Hill.” [Back]
On the Road Again // Answers
1. 0 [Back]
2. Shenandoah (in Virginia) and Great Smoky Mountains (in Tennessee and North Carolina) [Back]
3. Chinatown [Back]
4. The Colonial Parkway [Back]
5. The Redwood Highway [Back]
6. Elvis Presley Boulevard, which runs past Presley’s home, Graceland [Back]
7. The cloverleaf interchange [Back]
8. Key West, the “end of the road” (or the beginning) for the eastern U.S. [Back]
9. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania [Back]
10. The famous (and infamous) Bourbon Street [Back]
11. San Francisco [Back]
12. Yellowstone [Back]
13. Pennsylvania [Back]
14. Salt Lake City, Utah [Back]
15. U.S. Highway 1 [Back]
16. Interstates [Back]
17. Billy Graham, a native of the area [Back]
18. Montana [Back]
19. It was 55 mph. This was changed in 1995. [Back]
20. The Keys [Back]
21. Memphis [Back]
22. Washington, D.C., or near it; the Capital Beltway is the heavily traveled freeway encircling the city. [Back]
23. Austin, Texas; Pecan Street is Austin’s version of New Orleans’s Bourbon Street. [Back]
24. California; it’s a forty-five-mile mountain road near San Bernardino. [Back]
Beantown, Barb City, and Other City Nicknames // Answers
1. Chicago, Illinois, of course [Back]
2. Boston (as in “Boston baked beans”) [Back]
3. Nashville, Tennessee [Back]
4. Detroit, the “Motor Town” [Back]
5. Denver, Colorado, whose elevation is (surprise!) about 5,280 feet [Back]
6. Durham, home of Duke University; the Duke family, wealthy tobacco farmers, gave millions of dollars to the college. [Back]
7. Louisiana, noted for its use of crawfish in cooking [Back]
8. Lexington; the Bluegrass refers to the region of north central Kentucky. [Back]
9. Branson, noted for its many country music concert halls [Back]
10. Palm Springs, California [Back]
11. The nation’s first barbed-wire manufacturing company was there. [Back]
12. Colorado [Back]
13. Florida; Valdosta is near the heavily traveled I-75. [Back]
14. New Orleans [Back]
15. Huntsville, home of the NASA Space Flight Center [Back]
16. William Penn [Back]
17. New York; whether the rudeness is real or imaginary is a matter of opinion. [Back]
18. Pittsburgh [Back]
19. Nashville, Tennessee, which has the national offices of several Protestant denominations [Back]
20. San Jose, center of the state’s computer industry [Back]
21. Vermont [Back]
22. Soybean [Back]
23. The capital, Sacramento [Back]
24. Chicago, formerly second in population to New York, is now third. [Back]
25. Maine [Back]
26. New Orleans (or, if you prefer, N’awlins) [Back]
27. Tulsa [Back]
Notable Purchases // Answers
1. Manhattan Island, bought from Native Americans for twenty-four dollars’ worth of beads and trinkets [Back]
2. Thomas Jefferson’s [Back]
3. Florida [Back]
4. Norfolk [Back]
5. The Gadsden Purchase [Back]
6. Central Park [Back]
7. James Monroe, who negotiated the purchase as Thomas Jefferson’s diplomat to France [Back]
8. Florida; after Disston’s purchase, the development of southern Florida proceeded rapidly. [Back]
9. Richmond, Virginia [Back]
10. Walt Disney, who purchased the land for Disney World in 1965 [Back]
11. The Louisiana Purchase [Back]
12. Alaska, purchased at the urging of Secretary of State William Seward; people thought he was a fool to want the chilly wilderness. It was also called “Seward’s Folly.” [Back]
Little Egypt, Big Muddy, and Other Place Nicknames // Answers
1. North Carolina; its other nickname, “Tar Heel State,” is equally puzzling. [Back]
2. Yankee Stadium—or, to be precise, the old Yankee Stadium, which was demolished in 2009 (the new Yankee opened that same year). Ruth was, of course, “the Babe,” the Yankee legend. [Back]
3. Louisiana, which excels in both fishing and hunting [Back]
4. Rhode Island, naturally [Back]
5. Philadelphia [Back]
6. Salmon [Back]
7. Ohio [Back]
8. Georgia; if you’d noticed all the streets named “Peachtree” in Atlanta, you’d know this. [Back]
9. Chicago [Back]
10. Alabama [Back]
11. New Jersey [Back]
12. Louisiana; the name refers to a wide area of sugarcane plantations. [Back]
13. Tennessee [Back]
14. Illinois’s; several town names are Cairo, Thebes, and Karnak, all places in Egypt. The farmland supposedly reminded settlers of the fertile Nile River plains. [Back]
15. Wisconsin’s; for their resemblance to ground-dwelling badgers, the miners were called “badgers,” thus Wisconsin is the “Badger State.” [Back]
16. Arkansas [Back]
17. California, naturally [Back]
18. The five-hundred-mile-long Natchez Trace, running from Nashville to the Mississippi River [Back]
19. Virginia [Back]
20. “Mighty Mac” [Back]
21. New Mexico [Back]
22. Atlantic City [Back]
23. “The Prairie State,” besides being called “Land of Lincoln” [Back]
24. The Missouri [Back]
25. Washington [Back]
26. The Pocono Mountains [Back]
27. The Erie Canal, which connected the Hudson River with Lake Erie, opening up the western lands of the U.S. [Back]
28. Boston, Massachusetts [Back]
29. “The Old Man of the Mountain,” sometimes called the “Great Stone Face”; sadly, the granite formation suffered breakage in 2003, so the Old Man no longer exists. [Back]
30. Vermont, whose name in French, vert mont, means “green mountain” [Back]
31. Canada [Back]
32. Alabama, so called because of its central location in the South [Back]
33. Louisiana [Back]
Scraping the Sky: Tall Buildings // Answers
1. TCBY (The Country’s Best Yogurt); the forty-story TCBY Tower is now the Metropolitan Tower. [Back]
2. Xerox; the Xerox Tower is thirty stories. [Back]
3. The University of Pittsburgh; the Cathedral is one of the tallest college buildings in the world. [Back]
4. The Mormons; it’s the LDS (Latter-Day Saints) Church Office Building. [Back]
5. San Francisco, California [Back]
6. Thirteen stories (Can you guess the significance of thirteen?) [Back]
7. Honolulu, of course [Back]
8. A Virginian (naturally), James Monroe [Back]
9. Massachusetts; it’s in Boston. [Back]
10. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the second-tallest building is Two Liberty Place. [Back]
11. The Empire State Building [Back]
12. U.S. Steel [Back]
13. The Gateway Arch, symbol of the westward expansion of the U.S. [Back]
14. The National Cathedral, in its central bell tower [Back]
15. The aluminum company Alcoa’s [Back]
16. The Empire State Building [Back]
17. Atlanta, Georgia [Back]
18. Wells Fargo [Back]
19. Hotels—or, to be specific, hotel-casinos [Back]
20. The Statue of Liberty [Back]
More Funny Names on the Map // Answers
1. Nevada, of course, notorious for its gambling [Back]
2. Hot Springs, in Arkansas [Back]
3. Boca Raton; the name refers to pointed rocks near the entrance of the site’s inlet. [Back]
4. Missouri; there are several amusing theories about how the town got its name. [Back]
5. The Everglades [Back]
6. Othello [Back]
7. Texas [Back]
8. Calistoga (Get it? California + Saratoga = Calistoga.) [Back]
9. God—to be specific, the “Great Spirit,” which is what the Native American word Manitou means [Back]
10. Arizona [Back]
11. Raleigh, North Carolina; the town was named by a Raleigh native who apparently spelled the name as he pronounced it. [Back]
12. Utah [Back]
13. Los Angeles; the old Spanish name means “The town of our Lady the Queen of the angels of Porciuncula.” [Back]
14. They gave up their life jackets so other passengers could have them. [Back]
15. Albany, New York, held by the Dutch until 1664 [Back]
16. Hackensack [Back]
17. King of Prussia—which was actually named not for the king but for the sign on a local inn [Back]
18. Missouri [Back]
19. North Carolina [Back]
Replicas: When You Can’t Have the Real Thing . . . // Answers
1. The appropriately named New York-New York [Back]
2. The Parthenon—or, at least, a full-size replica of it; it is in much better condition than the one in Athens, Greece. [Back]
3. The U.S. Capitol; Little Rock’s is smaller. [Back]
4. Washington, D.C.; it is found at the city’s Franciscan Monastery. [Back]
5. Jamestown, Virginia; they are replicas of the ships that brought the first English colonists to Jamestown in 1607. [Back]
6. North Carolina; the replicas are at the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kill Devil Hills. [Back]
7. Dallas; the center also has a painting of Pentecost that is 20 feet wide and 124 feet long. [Back]
8. The Alamo, part of the leftover set from the 1959 John Wayne movie [Back]
9. Walden Pond; Thoreau’s time there led him to write the classic book Walden. [Back]
10. The American Bible Society’s; the significance is, of course, that a Gutenberg press produced the first printed Bible. [Back]
11. The Globe, home to Shakespeare’s plays; the city hosts an annual Shakespeare Festival. [Back]
12. The Pinta, the Niña, and the Santa Maria, replicas of Columbus’s three ships; they were sent out in honor of the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage. [Back]
13. George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon [Back]
14. Eureka Springs, Arkansas; the late Gerald L. K. Smith pioneered the project of building replicas of Old Jerusalem sites in Arkansas. The walls, at present, are all that have been completed. [Back]
Happy Trails to You // Answers
1. The Appalachian Trail (known as the AT to seasoned hikers) [Back]
2. The Trail of Tears [Back]
3. Cattle (plus human beings, of course) [Back]
4. The Natchez Trace, a Native-American trail that is now administered by the National Park Service [Back]