Familiar Things, Unexpected Places Quiz

Answer: Venus

The painting is 'The Birth of Venus', although it shows the goddess arriving on land rather than the moment of her birth. Botticelli places Venus on a broad scallop shell, with winds carrying her towards the shore and a figure waiting with a cloak. The spiral shell in the photograph is a general clue to the word 'shell', rather than the kind shown in the painting.

The work belongs to the Uffizi Galleries in Florence.

Answer: A fork

A fork is an attack on two or more enemy pieces by a single piece. In this example, the pawn threatens both targets because it captures diagonally forwards, and the opponent may struggle to save both with one reply. Any chess piece can make a fork. If one of the targets is the king, the opponent must deal with the check, which may leave the other piece exposed.

Answer: Mary Norton

Mary Norton's 'The Magic Bedknob' and 'Bonfires and Broomsticks' provided the basis for Disney's 'Bedknobs and Broomsticks'. The film stars Angela Lansbury as Eglantine Price, a woman learning witchcraft during the Second World War. An enchanted bedknob allows an ordinary bed to carry its passengers on magical journeys. Norton also wrote 'The Borrowers', whose tiny inhabitants make imaginative use of objects from the human household.

Answer: The Prime Minister

The Prime Minister chairs the Cabinet, where senior ministers discuss the government's most important business. Cabinet government works on the principle of collective responsibility: ministers are expected to support agreed government decisions in public, even if they argued against them in private.

The Cabinet is only part of the government, and it is not another name for Parliament. Smaller Cabinet committees consider particular areas of government business, helping share the workload.

Answer: The bridge

The bridge passes vibrations from the strings into the violin's wooden body, helping produce a much stronger sound than the strings alone could make. Its two feet rest on the wooden top of the instrument. The soundpost sits inside, between the top and back, and helps carry vibrations between them.

The tailpiece anchors the strings, while the fingerboard provides the surface against which the player presses them.

Answer: Finishing bottom of the final table

In English-language coverage of the Six Nations, the wooden spoon is commonly used as an informal label for the team finishing last. There is no official spoon-shaped trophy handed out alongside the winners' silverware. In this usage, the final table matters: scoring the fewest tries or conceding the most points does not, by itself, determine the recipient.

Some French usage reserves the expression for a team that loses every match.

Answer: An obelisk

Cleopatra's Needle is a granite obelisk: a tall, four-sided stone monument that narrows towards a small pyramid-shaped top. It originally stood at Heliopolis in Egypt and was erected for the pharaoh Thutmose III, long before Cleopatra VII's reign. It was later moved to Alexandria, before its journey to London's Victoria Embankment.

The other choices describe Egyptian structures: a pylon is a temple gateway, a mastaba is a flat-roofed tomb, and a stepped pyramid rises in tiers.

Answer: Elements that had not yet been discovered

Mendeleev arranged the known elements by considering their atomic weights and chemical properties. When the pattern suggested that an element was missing, he left a gap rather than forcing another element into its place. He even predicted properties of some missing elements, including the one later named gallium. Gallium's discovery in 1875, and its close match to his predictions, helped show the value of his table.

Answer: Australia

The common brushtail possum is native to Australia and was brought to New Zealand to establish a fur trade. The paintbrush picks up the word 'brush' in its name; the animal has a bushy tail that can grip branches as it climbs. In New Zealand, possums eat native plants as well as insects, birds' eggs and chicks, causing problems for native wildlife. Australian possums and American opossums are different groups of marsupials, despite their similar names.

Answer: Water ice

Saturn's bright main rings are made mostly of water ice, with smaller amounts of other material. Each particle follows its own orbit around the planet, so the rings are not solid bands like the jewellery in the photograph. Saturn's moons also influence its rings: some help shape them through gravity, while others supply material. Icy particles sprayed from Enceladus feed the more distant E ring.