Trivia Quiz

1. Who wrote the words `The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.`?
a) Ralph Waldo Emerson
b) Benjamin Disraeli
c) W S Gilbert
d) G K Chesterton

2. Which city in Canada is, apart from Paris, the world's largest French-speaking city?
a) Toronto
b) Montréal
c) Ontario
d) Québec

3. Which form of traditional narrative poetry is widespread in Europe and the USA?
a) Ballad
b) Sonnet
c) Verse
d) Triolet

4. Which Middle Eastern country has borders with Syria, Iraq, Israel and Saudi Arabia?
a) Turkey
b) Jordan
c) Iran
d) Mongolia

5. Most of his works were published anonymously, apart from Gulliver's Travels. Who was he?
a) Jonathan Swift
b) Mark Twain
c) Tom Sawyer
d) Bret Harte

6. Which defeat of French knights took place on 11 July 1302 by the Flemings of Ghent and Bruges?
a) Battle of Plataea
b) Battle of Courtrai
c) Battle of Zama
d) Battle of Actium

8. What is an alternative name for the Tubuai Islands, part of French Polynesia?
a) Truk Islands
b) Solomon Islands
c) Austral Islands
d) Norfolk Islands

9. In which city is the world famous Copacabana beach?
a) Kingston
b) Acapulco
c) Miami
d) Rio de Janeiro

10. Who was king of Scotland from 1040?
a) James I
b) Macbeth
c) Duncan
d) Kenneth II

11. What was the surname of Catherine, the fifth of Henry VIII's six wives?
a) Parr
b) Boleyn
c) Howard
d) Seymour

12. Which US office was held in the 19th century by James K Polk, Rutherford B Hayes, and Chester A Arthur?
a) Foreign Secretary
b) Vice President
c) President
d) Mayor of New York

13. What is the capital of Switzerland?
a) Geneva
b) Bern
c) Lausanne
d) Zürich

15. Which Moroccan city was devastated by an earthquake on 29 Feb 1960?
a) Agadir
b) Marrakesh
c) Fez
d) Casablanca

16. To which Mediterranean island was Napoleon Bonaparte exiled in the years 1814-15?
a) Elba
b) St Helena
c) Sardinia
d) Corsica

17. Which Caribbean island, together with the neighbouring island of Trinidad, forms a country in the West Indies?
a) Bermuda
b) Tobago
c) Jamaica
d) Cuba

18. Who said `Man is a tool-using animal ... Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.`?
a) Thomas Carlyle
b) Charles Darwin
c) Richard Leakey
d) Stephen Jay Gould

20. What is another name for Arbroath, a town in Scotland?
a) Inverness
b) Stirling
c) Aberdeen
d) Aberbrothock

21. Which nurse became famous for her medical care of soldiers in the Crimean War?
a) Queen Victoria
b) St Bernadette
c) Elizabeth Fry
d) Florence Nightingale

22. Who said `There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.`?
a) Nancy Mitford
b) Cyril Connolly
c) Martin Amis
d) Paul Gauguin

23. At 16,845 ft, what is the highest mountain in Turkey?
a) Mount Kenya
b) Mount Ararat
c) Mount Fuji
d) Mount Everest

24. Who said of Ramsay MacDonald`He had sufficient conscience to bother him, but not sufficient to keep him straight.`?
a) Winston Churchill
b) Stanley Baldwin
c) H H Asquith
d) David Lloyd George

25. Richard the Lion-heart, king of England from 1189-99, spent how much of his ten-year reign in England?
a) 6 months
b) 2 years
c) 8 years
d) 5 months

27. Who wrote the words `All moanday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday till the fear of the Law.`?
a) Spike Milligan
b) Flann O'Brien
c) James Joyce
d) Brendan Behan

29. Who said `My [foreign] policy is to be able to take a ticket at Victoria Station and go anywhere I damn well please.`?
a) Arthur Balfour
b) Viscount Palmerston
c) Winston Churchill
d) Ernest Bevin

30. What was the popular name for England among British troops in World War I?
a) Limey
b) Blighty
c) Uncle Sam
d) Old Faithful

32. What is the capital of the Netherlands?
a) Utrecht
b) The Hague
c) Amsterdam
d) Maastricht

33. Who wrote the words `He felt the loyalty we all feel to unhappiness - the sense that that is where we really belong.`?
a) Kingsley Amis
b) Virginia Woolf
c) Graham Greene
d) Henry James

34. In which country was Nicolae Ceausescu executed after an army uprising in 1990?
a) Romania
b) Hungary
c) Serbia
d) Czech Republic

35. Who wrote the words `Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.`?
a) Bob Geldof
b) Siegfried Sassoon
c) Bob Dylan
d) Bertolt Brecht

36. Which is Belgium's `City of Flowers`?
a) Brussels
b) Ghent
c) Bruges
d) Liège

37. What tragedy by William Shakespeare was first performed 1605-06?
a) Macbeth
b) Titus Andronicus
c) Pericles
d) Hamlet

38. The highest mountain in the USA stands in the state of Alaska, what is its name?
a) Mount Loga
b) Mauna Loa
c) Mount St Helens
d) Mount McKinley

39. Alice had adventures in Wonderland in Lewis Carroll's first book. Where did Alice go in the second story?
a) To never never land
b) Down a rabbit hole
c) Through the looking glass
d) Up the down road

40. What group of islands in the English Channel, off the Northwest coast of France, are a possession of the British crown?
a) Inner Hebrides
b) Channel Islands
c) Balearic Islands
d) Scilly Islands