NOVEMBER QUIZ - ANSWERS TO YESTERDAY'S QUESTIONS

Question 1: The unicorn is the national animal of which country?

Answer: Scotland

When did Scotland adopt the unicorn?  The answer to that question lies in heraldry - the age-old practice of designing coats of arms or crests to distinguish between groups of people, armies or institutions.  Using heraldry as our guide, we can see that the unicorn was first introduced to the royal coat of arms of Scotland around the mid 1500s..

Prior to the Union of the Crowns in 1603, their coat of arms was supported by two unicorns. However, when King James VI of Scotland also became James I of England, he replaced one of the unicorns with the national animal of England, the lion, as a display of unity between the two countries. Of course, folklore fans will know that lions and unicorns have always been enemies, locked in a battle for the title of ‘king of beasts’.

More information can be found here.

Question 2: Who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (in 1903)?

Answer: Marie Curie, née Sklodowska

Madame Curie won the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1903.  She was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911.

She was born on November 7th, 1867 in Warsaw, Russian Empire (now Poland), and died on July 4th, 1934 in Sallanches, France.  Cause of death was aplastic anemia from exposure to radiation in the course of her scientific research, and in the course of her radiological work at field hospitals during World War I.

More interesting information can be found here.

Question 3: What is the only fruit that has its seeds on the outside.

Answer: Strawberry

Here are other facts for you about one of my favorite fruits.

Strawberries are the first fruit to ripen each spring.

There are 200 seeds on an average strawberry.

The seeds can grow into new strawberry plants, but most instead reproduce through runners.

Strawberries are considered members of the rose family, they give off a sweet fragrance as they grow on bushes.

Considered a perennial, strawberry plants will grow back year after year.

Although they don't always grow fruit immediately, once they do, the plants can last up to 5 years.

The lesser-known tabletop method of cultivation, where strawberries hang from the ceiling in containers, is gaining in popularity for its practicality. Keeping strawberries off the ground keeps them away from pests and soil-borne diseases.

Ancient Romans believed strawberries had medicinal powers. They were used to treat everything from depression to fever and sore throats.

Native Americans were also among the earliest people to eat strawberries. They introduced European settlers to the fruit.

There are three different types of strawberries: June-bearing, overbearing and day neutral. But June-bearing are the most flavorful berries.

Don't rinse cut strawberries under water until you're ready to eat them - it speeds up spoiling.

Strawberries are grown in every single U.S. state and Canadian province.

I got all my information from this link.

Question 4: Cirque du Soleil started in what country?

Answer: Canada

"At the dawn of the 1980’s, a troupe of performers founded by Gilles Ste-Croix took their talent to the streets of Baie-Saint-Paul, a charming village on the shores of the St. Laurent River near Quebec City. Known to the public as Les Échassiers de Baie-Saint-Paul (The Stiltwalkers of Baie-Saint-Paul), this group would form the core of what would grow into Cirque du Soleil. This crew had an eclectic show, highlighting jugglers, dancers, fire breathers, and musicians who pleased local fans with their act. Little did these early fans and performers know that these embryonic beginnings would lead to something magical, exciting, and revolutionary on a global scale."

I found this information at their website here.

Question 5: where is the largest volcano of the world?

Answer: Tamu Massif volcano is the largest. It is an extinct submarine shield volcano in the northwest Pacific Ocean with the characteristics of a hybrid between a mid-ocean ridge and a shield volcano.   On 5 September 2013, researchers announced that it could be a single volcano, a claim which, if corroborated, would make Tamu Massif the largest known volcano on Earth. Tamu Massif is located in the Shatsky Rise about 990 miles/1,600 km east of Japan. The volcano covers an area of about 214,000 sq mi/553,000 square kilometres. Its summit is about 6,500 ft./1,980m below the surface of the ocean, and its base extends to about 4.0 mi/6.4 km deep. The volcano is about 14,620 ft/4,460 metres tall.

This information came from this link.

I will be back next month with another quiz. I hope you found this interesting and fun.

Thanks for joining in, and have a great weekend.

SEPTEMBER ANSWERS TO YESTERDAY'S QUESTIONS

(Blue Goose)

What is the national dish of Spain?

Paella

Paella is a rice dish originally from Valencia. For this reason, many non-Spaniards view it as Spain's national dish, but Spaniards almost unanimously consider it to be a dish from the Valencian Region. Valencians, in turn, regard paella as one of their identifying symbols. It is one of the best-known dishes in Spanish cuisine. The dish takes its name from the wide, shallow traditional pan used to cook the dish on an open fire, paella being the word for a frying pan in the Valencia's regional language.  As a dish it may have ancient roots, but in its modern form it is traced back to the mid-19th century, in the rural area around the Albufera lagoon adjacent to the city of Valencia, on the east coast of Spain.

Here are maps of Spain showing Valencia with the red pointer...

and another showing where Spain is located on a larger scale.

More information about this famous dish can be found here.  

Where is the Bermuda Triangle located?

In the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean, roughly bounded by Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico where dozens of ships and airplanes have disappeared.

(borrowed from the Wikipedia website)

Unexplained circumstances surround some of these disappearances, including one in which Flight 19, a squadron of five U.S. Navy bombers that became disoriented while flying over the area; the planes were never found. All 14 airman on the flight were lost, as were all 13 crew members of a navy flying boat which subsequently launched from Naval Air Station Banana River to search for Flight 19.

Other boats and planes have seemingly vanished from the area in good weather without even radioing distress messages.  

But although an extremely great number of fanciful theories have been proposed regarding the Bermuda Triangle, none of them prove that mysterious disappearances occur more frequently there than in other well-traveled sections of the ocean.  In fact, people navigate the area every day without incident.

The area referred to as the Bermuda Triangle, or Devil's Triangle, covers about 500,000 square miles of ocean off the southeastern tip of Florida.  When Christopher Columbus sailed through the area on his first voyage to the New World, he reported that a great flame of fire (probably a meteor) crashed into the sea one night, and that a strange light appeared in the distance a few weeks later.  He also wrote about erratic compass readings, perhaps because at that time a sliver of the Bermuda Triangle was one of the few places on Earth where true north and magnetic north lined up.

Another interesting story is that of 65 year old Joshua Slocum.  In 1909 and after gaining widespread fame as the first person to sail solo around the globe, Mr. Slocum disappeared in his 37 foot wooden sloop called "Spray".  He cast off from Martha's Vinyard in Massachussetts, as he had done hundreds of times before, and set sail for South America.  Besides being an experienced sailor, Mr. Slocum was also a world class author. Though it is unclear exactly what happened, many sources later attributed his death to the Bermuda Triangle.

My information came from here and also here.

This is for my Dad who was a big Tom and Jerry fan.  He has been gone many a year but I still remember his laughter watching that show.

Who developed the cartoon series of Tom and Jerry?

Answer: William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.  Hanna and Barbera also created Scooby Doo, Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, Top Cat and many more.

William Debney "Bill" Hanna, a native of Melrose, New Mexico.

Joseph Roland "Joe" Barbera, born of Italian heritage in New York City.  

This famous team first met at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studio in 1939.  Both had worked at other studios since the early 1930s, and the two became a partnership that would last for 60 years. Their first cartoon together, the Oscar-nominated Puss Gets the Boot, featuring a cat named Jasper and an unnamed mouse, was released in 1940 and served as the first entry in the long-running theatrical short subject series Tom and Jerry.  

They became the producers in charge of the MGM animation studio's output.  

The duo's cartoon firm officially opened for business in rented offices on the lot of Kling Studios (formerly Charlie Chaplin Studios) on July 7, 1957, one year after the MGM animation studio closed.

You can read more about this duo here.

If you were eating du Barry, what would you be eating?

Something with Cauliflower.  

"An easy, rich and creamy soup was named after Madame Jeanne Bécu, Comtesse du Barry, a famous French beauty who was the last official mistress of the ill-fated king, Louis XV. At the time, it was a common practice to recognize royalty and other public figures in the naming of new culinary creations, so whenever you see the term du Barry, you know the dish includes cauliflower." 

This is a link to where I found the information, and a recipe.

What do FM and AM stand for?

Answer: Frequency Modulation and Amplitude Modulation.

Differences in Spectrum Range

AM radio ranges from 535 to 1705 kilohertz, whereas FM ranges in a higher spectrum from 88 to 108 megahertz.  For AM radio, stations are possible every 10 kHz and FM stations are possible eveery 200 kHz.

AM method of audio transmission was first successfully carried out in the mid 1870s to produce quality radio over telephone lines and the original method used for audio radio transmissions. FM radio was developed in the United states mainly by Edwin Armstrong in the 1930s.

More information can be found here.

When was the first Calendar made?

8,000BC

British archaeology experts have discovered what they believe to be the world's oldest 'calendar', created by hunter-gatherer societies and dating back to around 8,000 BC.

The Mesolithic monument was originally excavated in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, by the National Trust for Scotland in 2004. Now analysis by a team led by the University of Birmingham, published today (July 15, 2013) in the journal Internet Archaeology, sheds remarkable new light on the luni-solar device, which pre-dates the first formal time-measuring devices known to Man, found in the Near East, by nearly 5,000 years.

My information came from here.