Answers below.
Questions
1 Humans share about 50 per cent of their DNA with bananas.
2 “Get thee to a nunnery.” Hamlet thought that only life in a convent could save Ophelia.
3 The Battle of Bunker Hill was a great victory for the American Revolution.
4 The minutes of a meeting are so called because the notes are written small – to be transcribed later.
5 Emerson wrote: “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
6 Eating ice cream makes you hotter rather than cooler.
7 Epicurus championed the value of the quiet mind.
8 The Pacific islands of Pago Pago are correctly pronounced Pango Pango, because their discoverers wanted a more musical name.
9 Iran is the old name for Persia.
10 A miniature painting is a small portrait.
11 Human nature continues to evolve with modern man.
12 Constantinople was renamed, in the Turkish language, as Istanbul.
13 A Jesuit moral theologian taught that if invited to a duel one might lawfully kill one’s opponent by stealth to avoid the sin of duelling.
14 The tulip originated in the Netherlands.
15 A lie detector cannot detect lies.
16 Our penances reduce our time in purgatory.
17 The Jerusalem artichoke is a popular vegetable from Israel.
18 Galileo did not drop objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate gravity.
19 Tobacco was first brought to Europe by Sir Walter Raleigh.
20 The first temptation was the apple offered to Eve.
21 The first aeroplane was powered by a steam engine.
22 Marie Antoinette, faced by the hunger of the poor, said: “Let them eat cake.”
23 Catgut is not made from cats’ guts.
24 Thomas Aquinas taught that women were conceived as a result of a defect, possibly as a result of a south wind at the time.
25 If you are varnished from head to toe, you will be smothered because you cannot breathe through your skin.
26 You will enrage a bull better with a green flag than a red flag.
27 In the story, Noah’s Ark ended up on Mount Ararat.
28 Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson.”
29 The first Quakers were Muslims.
30 A Pelagian is a heretic. A semi-Pelagian is a very small heretic.
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That is quite a difficult list of questions Quentin. Presenting them with the answers being only true or false makes them even more difficult to answer. Not that it is important; my preference would have been for the answers to be in a multiple choice format. That is much easier and more fun than the more difficult; true or false. Assuming that you are offered four possible answers for each question, multiple choice offers you the right answer from which the task becomes one of eliminating the most obvious two that are wrong, and then trying to figure out which of the two remaining answers are right and wrong.
Let me take this opportunity to wish everyone at SecondSight a Blessed Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year! Let us all hope and pray that 2016 will be better and a less difficult year in terms of international problems, than 2015.
Sound thinking, John. But you will not have been able to see that the quiz takes up a complete page in the Catholic Herald. Thus fourfold questions would have been at the fairly drastic expense of the number.
Do you feel you can share with us how many you got right?
I didn’t do too well I am afraid! I got nine out of 30 questions right. Or is nine out of 29 questions? You have provided us with ‘Merry Christmas’ as the answer to question 30.
As you know about semi Pelagians, I think you can properly claim 10. And I think that’s pretty good since the questions were chosen to maximise errors.
Anyone else prepared to step up to the plate?
Thank you Quentin and the blessings of the Season to you and all fellow contributors.
In this Limerick I have strung together the only ones I got right – I know. Disgraceful!
This moral theologian named Jana
Taught that women blew in from Havana
He died so it seems
In the flames of ice creams
The equal to half a banana.
Well done!
Question 15 has me thinking about how motion detectors and metal detectors actually detect anything.
Merry Christmas