See If You Can Measure Up Quiz | Thematic Fun

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. One tablespoon is equal to three teaspoons. Those are common terms, familiar to most. What is the term for 1/8 teaspoon?

Answer: Dash

There really is a measurement called a coffee spoon to go along with teaspoon. A coffee spoon is 1/4 teaspoon. Soupcon means a little bit. It has no defined amount associated with it. A gill is 8 tablespoons or 24 teaspoons. If your recipe calls for 1/8 teaspoon of salt, I sincerely hope you use a dash rather than a gill.

2. What is the term for something seven feet long?

Answer: Septipedalian

"Septi" denotes seven and "ped" denotes feet. A person who is 7' tall could be described as septipedalian. Yao Ming from China, at 7'6" and Margo Dydek from Poland, at 7'2", could be described as septipedalian basketball players. Ming is in the NBA while Dydek is in the WNBA.

Muggsy Bogues, the former NBA player, could not have been described as septipedalian. At 5'3" he was barely quintipedalian (five feet high.) However he was still able to dunk a basketball through a hoop set 10' above the floor. Big things do come in small packages.

3. What is another name for ten duotrigintillion?

Answer: Googol

Ten duotrigintillion is 1 followed by 100 zeros. Googol is shorter and easier to spell. There is a number called centillion. It is 1 followed by 303 zeros. There are no numbers called yahoo or gazillion. There is, however, a googolplex which is 1 followed by a googol of zeros. Numbers this big serve more trivial or interesting purposes than useful mathematic or scientific ones.

4. If a dozen is 12, and a gross is 12 dozen, what is a dozen gross?

Answer: Great gross

A dozen gross, or great gross, would be 1728. It is useful in a duodecimal (base 12) system because so many measurements can be easily translated into units of 12. Our common counting system is base 10 using the numbers 0-9. In a duodecimal system, the number 10 would be designated A, 11 would be designated B, and 12 would then be designated 10.
Dozenal is another name for duodecimal.
Vigesimal stands for base 20.

5. Surveyors have a term for an area of approximately 36 square miles. What is this term?

Answer: Township

A township is an area with a southern border 6 miles long, east and west borders 6 miles long which follow the meridians, and a northern border slightly less than 6 miles long. The area covered is not quite square in shape.

6. Old time ships needed ballast in the hull to add weight for stability. The English had a term for a quantity of 301 pounds of ballast. What was this term?

Answer: Pig

Sailing ships used both stone ballast and metal ballast. Metal ballast, where available, was preferred because its greater density allowed more weight to be carried for a given volume. Pig iron was often used as ballast because it was inexpensive. Pig iron is the first result of smelting ore with coke and limestone.

It has a high carbon content and is brittle making it undesirable for construction use. Modern ships use seawater for ballast because it can be easily onloaded and discharged as necessary and has the added benefit of being free.

7. Back when the British Navy would issue its sailors a daily ration of rum, the ration was 1/8 pint or about 2.5 ounces. What was the name for this size rum ration?

Answer: Tot

The British Navy ended the rum ration on July 31, 1970. They felt that, with the more sophisticated equipment to be found on Royal Navy ships at that time, it was a bad idea to issue free strong alcohol to their sailors. Instead the ration became three daily cans of beer. Some ships held ceremonies to dump their rum tubs overboard when the rum ration ended. Some buried their rum with a headstone. One ship, the HMS Dolphin, paraded their rum tub on a gun carriage with two drummers and a piper playing a dirge.
A jigger is 1.5 ounces.
Limey is a slang term for someone from England. It is derived from the practice of the British Navy of adding limes to the grog they served their sailors. Grog in this case referred to rum with either water or weak beer added to it.
Bumbo is a Caribbean drink made from rum, sugar, nutmeg and water.

8. What is the term for a container which can hold 252 gallons of beer?

Answer: Tun

Magnum is a size of champagne bottle equal to 2 regular bottles.
A kilderkin is an 18 gallon cask.
There is no sheepshead but there is a hogshead which is a 54 gallon cask.
You didn't ask, but there is also a unit called a puncheon. A puncheon holds 120 gallons of brandy or 114 gallons of rum.

9. If you were told to build an ark with dimensions in cubits, how would you know what a cubit was?

Answer: Length of the forearm

A cubit is about 18" although some cultures used a longer length and some used a slightly shorter length. In the Bible, Noah was asked to build an ark 300 cubits long by 50 cubits wide by 30 cubits high. Using an 18" cubit, the ark would have been 450' long, 75' wide and 45' high.
If you are ever asked to build an ark like Noah was, please leave the flies behind next time.

10. Parsec is a term used in astronomy to indicate the distance in light years to a celestial body. One parsec is defined as the distance from the Earth to a body that has a parallax of 1 arcsecond. An arcsecond is 1/60 of 1/60 of 1/360 (or 1/1,296,000) of a circle. A kiloparsec, then, is a distance of 1,000 parsecs. Approximately how far is a kiloparsec?

Answer: 3,259 light years

A parsec is 3.26 light years. If you had a spaceship capable of sustained flight at 2,000 mph it would take you over 1,000,000,000 years to travel 1 kiloparsec, or 1,000 parsecs.

Source: Author deputygary

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor trident before going online.
Any errors found in FunTrivia content are routinely corrected through our feedback system.

See If You Can Measure Up Trivia Quiz

Some units of measurement are familiar to most people. Some units of measurement are familiar to few people. This quiz is about the latter types. Good luck.

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