"...baby I'm..." - You're the Top II Quiz

Answer: Fuerteventura

SS America was originally built by the Newport News Shipbuilding Company for service with the United States Line, being commissioned on 10 August 1940. Having served as a troopship during the Second World War, America served in her primary role as an express liner between Europe and the United States for almost twenty years alongside her larger fleetmate, SS United States, until she was sold for use as a liner on the Europe to Australia run in 1964. She subsequently served until 1978, when she was sold for use as a cruise ship. After a number of court battles, the ship was eventually laid up at Piraeus in Greece, where she remained until 1993.

In 1992, ex-America was sold again, this time to a Thai firm with the intention that she be converted into a floating hotel based in Phuket. The ship, by now named American Star, departed Piraeus under tow on 31 December 1993 bound for the Atlantic, as she was unable to be taken through the Suez Canal. After passing into the Atlantic, the ship and her tug were caught in a thunderstorm that caused the towlines to snap. Efforts to regain the tow proved unsuccessful, and American Star ran aground at Playa de Garcey off the west coast of Fuerteventura on 18 January 1994. Within two days, the action of the Atlantic surf had caused the ship to break in two, with the stern section sinking in 1996. The continuing corrosion of the remaining bow section led to it eventually collapsing into the sea in 2007.

Answer: United Artists

By 1979, director Michael Cimino had had a pair of major successes with his first two films - the action comedy "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot", and the Vietnam War drama "The Deer Hunter" (for which he had received two Academy Awards). As a result, he was able to convince United Artists to greenlight his proposed western, "Heaven's Gate", which he had originally written in 1971. For the film, United Artists authorised a budget of approximately $11.5m with a plan for releasing the film in December 1979, but also gave the director virtual carte blanche to produce the film as he chose. Principal photography on "Heaven's Gate" began on 16 April 1979, and lasted almost a year, only ending in March 1980, with Cimino having shot almost 220 hours of footage.

The initial cut of the film ran to more than five hours, which led to executives at the studio refusing to put it out. As a result, Cimino spent the summer of 1980 re-editing the film, which came in at 3 hours and 39 minutes, with an eventual release in November 1980. However, upon its release, "Heaven's Gate" proved a critical failure, which led to United Artists pulling it. Following a further edit, it was re-released in April 1981, where it again failed at the box office, bringing in $3.5m against a budget of $44m, making it one of the biggest "box office bombs" of all time. The failure of "Heaven's Gate" led to the owners of United Artists, Transamerica, selling the studio to the Tracinda Corporation, which already owned MGM, bringing about the effective end of United Artists as a producer and distributor of motion pictures.

Answer: University College London

Mohandas Gandhi was the youngest son of Karamchand Gandhi, the 'Diwan', or Chief Minister of the state of Porbandar (now part of Gujarat). Born in 1869, at the age of seven Mohandas and his family moved to join his father who had moved to the state of Rajkot. At the age of 9, Mohandas entered school, where he was an average student. Entering into an arranged marriage at the age of 13, Mohandas graduated from high school in November 1887 and entered Samaldas College, although he soon had to drop out. Instead, he was advised by a family friend to study law in London. In September 1888, Gandhi sailed from Bombay bound for London, where he enrolled to study law and jurisprudence at University College London.

His studies at UCL led to his being accepted in the Inner Temple, one of the four Inns of Court, to train as a barrister. Gandhi was called to the bar in 1891 at the age of 22, after which he left London to return to India, where he established a modest legal practice in Rajkot, before he was offered the opportunity to work in South Africa as the company lawyer for the cousin of an acquaintance. In South Africa, where he planned to stay for just a year, he became a civil rights activist and advocate for the Indian community in the country, who suffered significant discrimination. It was while in South Africa, where he remained for more than twenty years, that the honorific "Mahatma", a Sanskrit word meaning "venerable", was first applied, and by which Gandhi became universally known.

Answer: Armagnac

Armagnac is a type of brandy produced in the Armagnac region of southwest France. The oldest type of brandy still produced, armagnac is made by blending wines made from a variety of grapes, which are then distilled using column stills, rather than pot stills that are used in the production of cognac. Additionally, unlike cognac, which is distilled twice, armagnac is only distilled once, which makes the alcohol content lower than in cognac. The resulting spirit that emerges from the still is then put into oak barrels, where it is aged. Aging in barrels further reduces the alcohol content; the longer it is aged, the more flavours develop in the brandy, while aging also causes the spirit to develop its characteristic brown colour.

When the armagnac is removed from the barrels for bottling, it is given one of a number of classifications, which refer to the age of the brandy when it is bottled, with the classification on the bottle referring to whichever of the different brandies that have gone into the blend is the youngest. One of the classifications of armagnac is XO, which is also referred to as Napoleon, in which the youngest brandy in the blend must be at least six years old.

Answer: Alicante

The Bonfires of Saint John is a popular festival that is widely celebrated to commemorate Midsummer and St John's Eve, the day before the feast day of St John the Baptist. In Spain, the festival is particularly popular in Catalan speaking areas, where special foods, such as coca de sant joan, a traditional pastry, are served. However, Spain's biggest festival has, since the late 1920s, taken place in the city of Alicante, the second-largest city in the Valencian Community.

Until 1928, the Bonfires festival had been celebrated in Alicante in the same way as elsewhere in Spain. In that year, Jose Maria Py, the organiser of the Bonfires festival, decided that the city needed a major fiesta, and so decided to amalgamate the Bonfires with the Valencian tradition of "falles", which is where special statues or monuments are constructed by groups or neighbourhoods and then burned. In Alicante, the festival lasts from the 19 June, when the falles are set up in the streets, through to midnight on 25 June, when it culminates with the burnings and a fireworks display.

Answer: Pall Mall

In 1777, the British government was offered the opportunity of purchasing the art collection of the former Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, which it was argued could be displayed in "a noble gallery". Nothing came of this, nor the opportunity to purchase the Orleans collection twenty years later. Despite this, there remained calls for a national collection of artworks to be assembled and displayed. In 1814, Britain's first purpose built public art gallery, Dulwich Picture Gallery, opened displaying the collection assembled by Sir Francis Bourgeois, which further renewed calls for a national collection.

In 1823, another opportunity arose when the collection of John Julius Angerstein became available. At the same time, Sir George Beaumont offered part of his own collection, on condition that the Angerstein collection be purchased and a suitable gallery prepared for their display. The same year, the Austrian Empire unexpectedly paid a war debt to the United Kingdom, which was used to purchase the collection. The new National Gallery opened on 10 May 1824 in Angerstein's former house at 100 Pall Mall, initially displaying the Angerstein collection, with the Beaumont donation joining them in 1826, and a further 35 paintings in 1831 following a bequest by the Reverend William Holwell Carr. The gallery remained in Pall Mall until 1838, when a new building located in Trafalgar Square was completed.

Answer: Anna Christie

Greta Garbo first came to prominence as a model in her native Sweden in the early 1920s, where she was seen by a director of film commercials. Her appearances in commercials over two years led to her coming to the notice of the director Erik Arthur Petschler, who cast her in a short comedy film. This saw her able to attend Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Training Academy between 1922 and 1924, at the end of which she was cast by noted Finnish director Mauritz Stiller in his film "The Saga of Gösta Berling", which was followed by a starring role in GW Pabst's "The Street of Sorrow" the following year.

Her work in Europe brought Garbo to the attention of Louis B. Mayer, the general manager of MGM in the United States. In July 1925, Garbo, alongside Stiller, departed Sweden for New York, before then travelling to Los Angeles. Eventually, they were put in touch with Irving Thalberg, MGM's head of production, who gave Garbo a screen test. Thalberg was so impressed that he arranged to work with Garbo immediately, which included getting her English lessons. Her first American film was "Torrent" in 1926, with the next four years seeing her play in a succession of hit movies. However, by 1929, sound had become an imperative - Garbo's last silent film was 1929's "The Kiss", with the studio worried that her accent might put audiences off. However, her first sound film, "Anna Christie", directed by Clarence Brown, was released in 1930, and was a huge success, making almost $1.5m at the box office, and garnering Garbo the first of her four Academy Award nominations for Best Actress.

Answer: Switzerland

Cellophane is a packaging material made of regenerated cellulose. Invented by Jacques Brandenberger, a chemist from Zurich employed by the French firm Blanchisserie et Teinturerie de Thaon (BTT), the idea stemmed in 1900 after he saw wine spill onto a tablecloth in a restaurant, and decided to try and find a cloth that could repel liquids. Having tried spraying viscose onto fabric, he determined that the result became too stiff to use, but the transparent coating could be removed fairly easily in one piece, which led to his abandoning the original idea and pursuing this new one. Having softened it using glycerin, by 1912 he had designed and built a machine to produce his new film, which he named "cellophane" - a portmanteau of cellulose and diaphane, meaning transparent.

In 1913, Comptoir des Textiles Artificiels (CTA) bought out BTT's interest in cellophane, as well as procuring the services of Brandenberger, and established a new company, La Cellophane, to undertake the production of the product. Although as initially developed, cellophane was water-proof, it remained permeable to water vapour until 1927, when chemist William Hale Church developed a nitrocellulose lacquer to apply to cellophane that made it moisture proof for the DuPont company. In 1927, moisture-proof cellophane was released that tripled the use of the product between 1928 and 1930.

Answer: Pork

In North America, turkey is the traditional main part of the celebration dinner eaten both at Thanksgiving (the second Monday in October in Canada, and the fourth Thursday in November in the United States) and Christmas, and has been eaten in North America since around the 15th century. However, it was not common for turkeys to be eaten at these times of year, as the time of year that they occur was also generally the time of year that pigs were slaughtered, with the result that pork, often as ribs, were prepared for most peoples' holiday dinners.

Despite this, the use of turkey around Thanksgiving was promoted from the dawn of the United States as a nation, with Alexander Hamilton proclaiming that "no citizen of the United States should refrain from turkey on Thanksgiving Day". Turkey at Thanksgiving increased in popularity during the 19th century, while its use at Christmas has tended to follow the tradition from the United Kingdom, with ham still served in some areas as a result of its being used as an alternative to turkey (or some other roasted fowl) by those unable to afford a bird.

Answer: Secretariat

Secretariat was born in 1970 at the Meadow Stud in Virginia. Two years later he made his debut, beginning his two-year old season at Aqueduct in New York City, finishing fourth in his maiden race. However, he was raced another seven times during the year, winning all seven, which led to his winning the Eclipse Award for Champion Two-Year Old Male, as well as becoming only the third two-year old to win the American Horse of the Year award.

The following year, Secretariat achieved history by becoming only the ninth horse to win the American Triple Crown of the Preakness Stakes, Belmont Stakes and Kentucky Derby. The first of these, the Derby at Churchill Downs, saw Secretariat, ridden by Ron Turcotte, installed as 3/2 joint favourite. His winning time of 1:59.04 was the first winning time under two minutes, with his times at each quarter-mile post being successively faster than the previous. At the other two races he win to achieve the Triple Crown, Secretariat also went on to break the course records, winning the Belmont in 2:24 and the Preakness in 1:53 (although this was only confirmed in 2012 following a forensic analysis of the race video). Secretariat was retired after his three-year old season, going on to sire more than 660 foals.