FREE! Click here to Join FunTrivia. Thousands of games, quizzes, and lots more!
Quiz about The Number You Have Reached
Quiz about The Number You Have Reached

The Number You Have Reached... Quiz


You may think that literature is all about letters -- but these books and stories give the numbers center stage. Can I count on you to keep them straight?

A multiple-choice quiz by CellarDoor. Estimated time: 5 mins.
  1. Home
  2. »
  3. Quizzes
  4. »
  5. Literature Trivia
  6. »
  7. Mixed Literature
  8. »
  9. Specific Subjects & Themes

Author
CellarDoor
Time
5 mins
Type
Multiple Choice
Quiz #
346,865
Updated
Dec 03 21
# Qns
10
Difficulty
Average
Avg Score
8 / 10
Plays
5589
Awards
Top 5% quiz!
Last 3 plays: malidog (8/10), quizzer74 (9/10), Steelflower75 (9/10).
- -
Question 1 of 10
1. In "1984" (1949), George Orwell painted a vivid and terrifying picture of a future totalitarian state. By what name do the characters refer to the dictator who rules their lives? Hint


Question 2 of 10
2. Literary numbers aren't a new thing; in fact, numbers have been crucial to literature for millennia. In the title of Aeschylus's famous tragedy, produced for Athens' Dionysia festival in 467 BC, how many were arrayed "against Thebes"? Hint


Question 3 of 10
3. "The Nine Billion Names of God", by Arthur C. Clarke, is a very short story, but it turns the world upside-down and inside-out. The protagonists have been hired to help a customer with a new computer. Who is the customer? Hint


Question 4 of 10
4. Here's another numbered dystopian novel: Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451". To what does the book's title refer? Hint


Question 5 of 10
5. An enterprising author may try to pick up where another writer has left off, breathing new life into beloved characters and settings while receiving more-or-less free publicity. Yet, sometimes, the free-riding author is famous in her or his own right. One of the great writers of the 19th century deployed this very strategy with his story "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade". Who was he? Hint


Question 6 of 10
6. David Ebershoff reached the bestseller lists with "The 19th Wife," a novel blending two threads: the fictionalized account of a figure from 19th-century history, and the modern story of a fictional youth with a family in crisis. What religion is at the center of both stories? Hint


Question 7 of 10
7. "Slaughterhouse-Five" (1969), the book that made Kurt Vonnegut's name, tells the tale of a war veteran named Billy Pilgrim who has become "unstuck in time." To which of these World-War-II horrors is Billy a witness? Hint


Question 8 of 10
8. "A Thousand Splendid Suns" examines one family to explore the plight of Afghan women under Taliban rule. Who was its author, a man who first earned fame with an earlier novel that looked at Afghanistan through the lens of kites? Hint


Question 9 of 10
9. In 1968, Arthur C. Clarke took readers on "A Space Odyssey", centered on a set of strange monoliths with a deep connection to humanity's past and future. What year appears in the title of this influential book? Hint


Question 10 of 10
10. Shipwrecks are always good for a page-turner, but this one has a twist: the sole survivors are a boy and a Bengal tiger, and they're stuck in the same life raft. Which book hinges on this unusual premise? Hint



(Optional) Create a Free FunTrivia ID to save the points you are about to earn:

arrow Select a User ID:
arrow Choose a Password:
arrow Your Email:




Most Recent Scores
Mar 12 2024 : malidog: 8/10
Mar 06 2024 : quizzer74: 9/10
Mar 05 2024 : Steelflower75: 9/10
Mar 01 2024 : Guest 23: 5/10
Feb 29 2024 : mickeyp: 10/10
Feb 24 2024 : Guest 68: 3/10
Feb 22 2024 : gma4: 4/10
Feb 19 2024 : dim_dude: 7/10
Feb 16 2024 : mulder100: 9/10

Score Distribution

quiz
Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. In "1984" (1949), George Orwell painted a vivid and terrifying picture of a future totalitarian state. By what name do the characters refer to the dictator who rules their lives?

Answer: Big Brother

Probably modeled after the friendly face with which "Uncle Joe" Stalin masked Soviet dictatorship, Big Brother is supposedly concerned only with his people's best interests. He will take on any burden to help them, be it spreading propaganda through the Ministry of Truth; watching individuals constantly through television-like screens; or even torturing or killing the insufficiently grateful. And what can one person do about it? Remember, Big Brother is watching ...
2. Literary numbers aren't a new thing; in fact, numbers have been crucial to literature for millennia. In the title of Aeschylus's famous tragedy, produced for Athens' Dionysia festival in 467 BC, how many were arrayed "against Thebes"?

Answer: Seven

"Seven Against Thebes" was the third in a prizewinning trilogy about the tragedies of Oedipus and his family. Today, the first two plays ("Laius" and "Oedipus") are lost, but "Seven Against Thebes" survives as a testament to the father of tragedy. In the play, the sons of the doomed Oedipus - Polynices and Eteoclus - battle over the city of Thebes. Eteoclus is inside the walls; Polynices leads the army outside of it. The Seven are the captains of Polynices' army, each of whom attacks one of the gates of the city; the last of them is Polynices himself. If you're familiar with the tropes of Greek tragedy, it will not surprise you to hear that Polynices finally faces his brother, and that both die in the struggle.

Sophocles wrote another set of three plays about the same family, all of which survive and are still sometimes performed: "Oedipus Rex", "Oedipus at Colonna", and "Antigone". Antigone was the sister of these two ill-fated brothers, and she was herself doomed for her love of them.
3. "The Nine Billion Names of God", by Arthur C. Clarke, is a very short story, but it turns the world upside-down and inside-out. The protagonists have been hired to help a customer with a new computer. Who is the customer?

Answer: A Buddhist monastery

The story was first published in 1953, so the computer is primitive by today's standards: to perform its tabulations, it needs both careful programming and periodic attention. The monastery, isolated in the mountains of Tibet, has hired the engineers to ensure the machine completes its task: listing the nine billion names of God, according to rules laid down ages ago.

The engineers find the goal funny -- and then they find it frightening. The story is well worth a read.
4. Here's another numbered dystopian novel: Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451". To what does the book's title refer?

Answer: The temperature at which paper ignites

The novel's protagonist is employed as a "fireman" -- but in this grim future, his job is not to fight fires but to set them. All books, you see, have been outlawed in favor of more mind-numbing (and propaganda-friendly) entertainment. Our hero, Guy Montag, begins the 1953 book as a competent and content destroyer of illicit libraries, and ends it as a member of the underground literati.
5. An enterprising author may try to pick up where another writer has left off, breathing new life into beloved characters and settings while receiving more-or-less free publicity. Yet, sometimes, the free-riding author is famous in her or his own right. One of the great writers of the 19th century deployed this very strategy with his story "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade". Who was he?

Answer: Edgar Allan Poe

The story, which first appeared in 1845, begins with Poe's recapitulation of the basic story of Scheherazade: how the king married a new maiden every night and put her to death each morning, and how the beautiful and cunning Scheherazade postponed her own doom by telling a thrilling story each night, and leaving it tantalizingly near its climax at the appointed hour of her execution.

After a thousand and one nights, the king had fallen in love, and spared her life forever - except, of course, in Poe's retelling, wherein Scheherazade cannot help but launch into a new tale of Sinbad's increasingly implausible adventures. I don't want to tell you how this one ends!
6. David Ebershoff reached the bestseller lists with "The 19th Wife," a novel blending two threads: the fictionalized account of a figure from 19th-century history, and the modern story of a fictional youth with a family in crisis. What religion is at the center of both stories?

Answer: Mormonism

The historical figure in this 2009 book is Ann Eliza Young, by some reckonings the nineteenth wife of the Mormon prophet Brigham Young. In those days, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) practiced polygamy, but Young's break from her husband -- and public accusations about the injustices of the lifestyle -- helped inflame public opinion.

The LDS church no longer condones polygamy, but some fundamentalist Mormons require it, and the book's modern hero grew up in such a community. Exiled due to his homosexuality -- and due to the demographic math of a system where one man might have more than a dozen wives -- he returns to help his mother, who stands accused of his father's murder. (She had been, by some counts, the victim's nineteenth wife.) Both stories are poignantly told.
7. "Slaughterhouse-Five" (1969), the book that made Kurt Vonnegut's name, tells the tale of a war veteran named Billy Pilgrim who has become "unstuck in time." To which of these World-War-II horrors is Billy a witness?

Answer: The firebombing of Dresden

The title of the book refers to the converted building in which the American Billy is held as a prisoner of war. After the destruction of the surrounding city by Allied bombs, he is a witness to the total devastation of a beautiful city. Over and over, in a life-lived-out-of-order in which he is kidnapped by aliens, has two families, and is murdered, he returns to the scene of this original horror. "So it goes" is the book's fatalist refrain, invoked with every ordinary and extraordinary tragedy of war.
8. "A Thousand Splendid Suns" examines one family to explore the plight of Afghan women under Taliban rule. Who was its author, a man who first earned fame with an earlier novel that looked at Afghanistan through the lens of kites?

Answer: Khaled Hosseini

"A Thousand Splendid Suns", released in 2007, shared a setting and some themes with 2003's "The Kite Runner". Two Afghan women - to whom many paths are denied because of their sex - inhabit a deeply circumscribed world that is nonetheless much more complex than it appears at first. Both married to the same abusive man, their passions, struggles, and friendship illuminate a bleak plotline, like the "splendid suns" of the title. (The image comes from a poem written by Saib Tabrizi in the 1600s, referring to "the thousand splendid suns that hide behind [Kabul's] walls.")
9. In 1968, Arthur C. Clarke took readers on "A Space Odyssey", centered on a set of strange monoliths with a deep connection to humanity's past and future. What year appears in the title of this influential book?

Answer: 2001

Clarke wrote "2001: A Space Odyssey" while working with Stanley Kubrick on a movie version of the same story; the film won the race, but the book makes a lot more sense. The story begins early in hominid evolution, but most of the action takes place in 2001, on a manned mission looking for the origin of the monoliths.

This space voyage includes one of the most famous subplots in science fiction: the descent into treachery of the shipboard computer, the HAL-9000. (There's another number!) Three sequels reference three later years: 2010, 2061, and 3001.
10. Shipwrecks are always good for a page-turner, but this one has a twist: the sole survivors are a boy and a Bengal tiger, and they're stuck in the same life raft. Which book hinges on this unusual premise?

Answer: Life of Pi

In this 2001 book by Yann Martel, Pi is the nickname of the boy; it doesn't really refer to the famous transcendental number, but bear with me. Pi's parents are zookeepers, and they're traveling with a whole menagerie when their ship sinks. The novel follows Pi, on the open ocean, as he struggles to survive and as he (eventually) reaches a kind of understanding with the big cat. Or does he? The final scenes in the book cast doubt on what has come before, and the reader must choose what story she wants to believe.
Source: Author CellarDoor

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor looney_tunes before going online.
Any errors found in FunTrivia content are routinely corrected through our feedback system.
3/29/2024, Copyright 2024 FunTrivia, Inc. - Report an Error / Contact Us