Mastermind Club 2020  Quiz No 1

Ancient Egypt

1/  What does the word Hieroglyphs mean?         Sacred Writing

2/  Ancient Egypt was reponsible for the earliest known peace treaty which was between Egypt and what group of people?           The Hittites

3/ What was the first pyramid to be built called?     The Pyramid of Djoser (Also known as the Step Pyramid)

4/ What is the oldest known monumental sculpture in Egypt?

The Great Sphinx of Giza (Built in the reign of Pharaoh Khafre around 2558-2531 BC)

5/ What was the name of the funerary figurine placed in tombs to serve as sevants for the deceased in the afterlife?                         Shabti (or ushabti) dolls

6/ The Great Pyramids of Giza consists of how many pyramids?                                                                                                                  3 (Built for the pharaohs Khufu, Khafre & Menkaure)

7/ Which ancient Egyptian dynasty was Ramses III the pharaoh of?     The 20th Dynastry

8/ Which pharaoh was the father of Ramses III?     The Pharaoh  Setnakhte

9/  Who was the first historically confirmed female pharaoh?     Sobekneferu ( she reigned from 1806-1802BC)

10/ Which female pharaoh had the longest reign?     Hatshepsut (1507-1458 BC)

11/ The month of August is the 8th month of the year due to which pharaoh?                                                                                Cleopatra VII  (After her defeat by Augustus, the Roman Senate decided he should have a month named after him. He chose the 8th month. This was the month Cleopatra died, and he wanted to create a yearly reminder of his victory.)

12/ Which pharaoh has the most surviving statues?     Amenhotep III  (over 250 statues have survived)

13/  How man years did Tutankhamun reign?   Ten years (1332-1323 during the 18th Dynasty)

14/ How old was Tutankhamun when he became pharaoh?     Nine years old

15/ What was the name of Tutankhamun’s wife?     Ankhesanamun

16/ How many children did Tuankhamun have?    Two (stillborn daughters)

17/ What does Tutankhamun mean?                                                                                                                                                            Living Image of Amun (His original name was Tutankhaten meaning Living Image of Aten. He changed it on becoming pharaoh to dissacociate himself from his fathers reign)

18/ During his lifetime Tutankhamun contracted multiple infections of what disease?                                                                      Malaria (DNA  tests on his mummy found multiple strains of the disease)

19/ What year was Tutankhamun’s tomb discovered?   (November 4th) 1923

20/ How many sarcophagi was Tutankhamun buried in?                                                                                                                        Three  (The first was solid stone) The second wood and covered with gold and semi precious stone and the third, solid gold and weighs approx. 110 kilograms

Mastermind Club 2020  Quiz No 2

General Knowledge

1. The name of which country means “The Shallows”?   The Bahamas

2. What common factor links actors Ian McKellen, Julie Walters, Humphrey Bogart and Miley Cyrus?                                               They all have a “Bacon number” of 2 in the internet game sensation Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

3. What name is given to the traditional Alpine women’s costume notable for its close-fitting bodice?  Dirndl

4. The Koran is divided into 114 sections – what are these known as?   Surahs

5. What was the name of the Smurfs’ evil nemesis?  Gargamel

6. Which US state’s official nickname is the Show-Me State?   Missouri

7. Although he and his wife were too afraid to use it, US President Benjamin Harrison was the first to install what in the White House?   Electricity – an engineer would be brought it every day to switch the lights off and on

8. Which Premier League club has the motto “Superbia in Proelia” (“Pride in Battle”) on their crest?  Manchester City

9. “Let us join in a cohort / We are ready to die” are lines from the chorus of which country’s national anthem?   Italy

10. Granadilla is another name for which fruit?    Passion fruit

11. Which Caribbean-born British author wrote the novels Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea?   Jean Rhys

12. What pasta sauce derives its name from the Italian word for angry?    Arrabiata

13. An attack on Nancy Kerrigan orchestrated by the ex-husband of her rival, Tonya Harding, sent a shockwave through which sport in 1994?    Ice skating

14. The Hindenburg Disaster occurred when a German Zeppelin airship tried to dock at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in which US state?      New Jersey

15. Pudong, meaning “east bank”, is the financial district of which city?     Shanghai

16. Who presented four series of television’s The Hotel Inspector between 2005 and 2008?      Ruth Watson

17. Which semi-precious mineral is also known as Derbyshire Spar?      Blue John

18. Jack Kerouac, Wiilliam S.Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg were pioneers of which literary movement?  The Beat Generation

What was Britains first National Park?   The Peak District in 1951

20. In the book Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe, where exactly was Moll Flanders born?   Newgate prison

21. Where would you find the mountain range Maxwell Montes?     On Venus

22. Its a system, that to some harmonizes the surrounding environment, but what is the literal meaning of the Chinese phrase Feng Shui?       Wind Water

23. Which group of islands consists of the main islands of St.Croix, St.John and St.Thomas?  The U.S. Virgin Islands

24. Which very tough, hard, and stable mineral, is a nine on the Moh’s scale of hardness?      Corundum

25. If ‘nano’ is a unit prefix meaning ‘one billionth’, what unit prefix in the metric system denotes ‘one trillionth’?     Pico

26. In September 2016, Cardiff city centre ‘gave way to magic and invention’ to celebrate the centenary of the birth of which famous person?     Roald Dahl

27. Which German philosopher. a leading figure in modern philosophy, wrote The Critique of Pure Reason?    Immanuel Kant

28. Which island, off the coast of Alaska, is the second largest island in the United States?    Kodiak Island

29.  ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’ is a famous 1884 painting by which artist? And the painting is a leading example of which technique?    Georges Seurat    Pointillism

30. In February 2015, 400 people turned up to demonstrate when President Lisa Wehden invited Marine Le Pen to speak in which city?     Oxford (Lisa Wehden was then President of the Oxford University Debating Society)

31/Which country joined the EU in 2013 and was the first new EU member state since Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007?   Croatia

32. What is the third largest cat species after the Tiger and the Lion?    Jaguar

33. Superintendent Mr.Gradgrind open which Dickens novel with the line, “Now, what I want is, facts”? Hard Times

34. Who was the third man to walk on the moon?     Pete Conrad

35. What name is given to the elevated region of mountains and plateau’s in the middle of southern France, that covers 15 percent of the country?    The Massif Central

36. Parts of the space research satellite Skylab fell to earth in 1979 close to which Australian city?     Perth

37. Which word, often associated with sport, is an ancient Roman or Greek measurement of about 185 metres?   Stadium

38. The middle name of Amerian track legend Jesse Owen, is also the name of an American city – what is it?   Cleveland

39. Which British pop group is best known for scoring zero points in the 2003 Eurovision Song Contest in Latvia?      Jemini

40. Which European capital city has a name that means ‘bay of smokes’ in English?    Reykjavik

41. Which Oxford college was founded by Elizabeth I in 1571 for the education of clergy; it is the only Oxford college to date from Elizabeth’s reign?   Jesus College

42. What word is used for a hole emmitting gasses or steam in a volcano, and is derived from the Latin for smoke?   Fumerole

43. What is the common name of the bird buteo buteo, whose population decreased greatly in the 1950’s when rabbits were decimated by myxomatosis?  Buzzard

44. Which title character from Shakespeare kills characters called Tybalt and Paris?   Romeo

45. What is the capital city of Armenia?   Yerevan

46. from which country does Cotija cheese originate?  Mexico

47. In area, which is the 7th largest country in Europe?    Finland

48.Who played the main antagonist Le Chiffre in the 21st James Bond film Casino Royale?    Mads Mikkelsen

49. How are the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution known?    The Bill of Rights

50. Which team won the 2019 Baseball World Series?    Washington Nationals

Mastermind Club 2020  Quiz No 3

Last lines from famous works of Literature

1/  “Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.”                                                                  William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847-48)

2/ I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my ___Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

3/ “It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.”      Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)

4/  “Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn’t prove there was no America.     Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

5/  “This stone is entirely blank. The only thought in cutting it was of the essentials of the grave, and there was no other care than to make this stone long enough and narrow enough to cover a man. No name can be read there.”                                                    Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862)

6/  “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”       George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)

7/ “The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky-seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”                                                         Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)

8/ ” She’s never found peace since she left his arms, and never will again till she’s as he is now!                                                   Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895)

9/ ” Up out of the lampshade, startled by the overhead light , flew a large nocturnal butterfly that began circling the room. The strains of the piano and violin rose up weakly from below.”                                                                                                                      Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

10/ “April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”                                                                                  James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

11/ “Okay  baby, hold tight”, said Zaphod. “We’ll take in a quick bite at the restaurant at the end of the Universe”                         Douglas Adams, The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978)

12/  Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privilege and the curse of ___ ___ to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace. Salman Rushdie, Midnights Children (1981)

13/  Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus.       Charlotte Brontë,  Jane Eyre (1847)

14/  He loved Big Brother.     George Orwell,  1984  (1949)

15/  It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

16/  If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.                       Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (1963)

17/  The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.     Joseph Heller,  Catch 22  (1961)

18/  Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to (the title) did not have a second opportunity on earth.                    Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

19/  I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.                                James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

20/  The broken flower drooped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place.                   William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

Mastermind Club 2020  Quiz No 4

Movie Tag Lines

Identify the movie from its tag line

1/ The Eighth wonder of the World.     King  Kong

2/ The longer you wait the harder it gets.   40 Year Old Virgin

3/ An Adventure 65 Million Years In The Making.    Jurassic Park

4/ Whoever said “Tomorrow is another day” ….didnt check the weather.        The Day After Tomorrow 

5/ Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.  Jaws 2

6/ Its Alive.   Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

7/ He loved the American Dream with a vengance.  Scarface

8/ Does for rock n roll what “The Sound of Music” did for hills.     This is Spinal Tap

9/ A lot can happen in the middle of nowhere.   Fargo

10/ Protecting those who fear them.    X-Men

11/ When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth. The Dawn of the Dead

12/ 3.1415926535897932384626433832795      Pi

13/ He is afraid. He is alone. He is 3 million light years from home.      E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

14/ Look Closer    American Beauty

15/ To enter the mind of a killer she must challenge the mind of a madman. The Silence of the Lambs

16/ Mischief. Mayhem.     Soap. Fight Club

 17/ A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere.     Easy Rider

18/ The temperature where freedom burns.     Fahrenheit  9/11

19/ To boldly go where no man has gone before.      Star Trek

20/ Love is a Force of Nature     Brokeback Mountain

21/ In space, no one can hear you scream.     Alien

22/ What you call hell, he calls home.     Rambo

23/ Size Does Matter  Godzilla

24/ At last, a comedy that bites! Caddyshack

25/ The night HE came Home.    Halloween

26/ Some memories are best forgotten.  Memento

27/ Man has made his Match…Now it’s his problem.   Blade Runner

28/ 40 Stories Of Sheer Adventure.    Die Hard

29/ Love means never having to sat you’re sorry.      Love Story

30/ Every man dies, not every man really lives.    Braveheart

31/ Nice planet. We’ll take it.    Mars Attacks

32/ The future will not be user-friendly.     The Matrix

33/ If he were any cooler, he’d be frozen, baby!      Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery

34/ If Nancy doesn’t wake up screaming she won’t wake up at all….    A Nightmare on Elm Street

35/ He was never in time for his classes…He wasn’t in time foe his dinner…Then one day…he wasn’t in his time at all.                    Back to the Future

36/ The most beautiful love story ever told.   Beauty and the Beast

37/ The truth is out there.    The X-Files

38/ Experience the Event That Named a Generation.     Woodstock

39/ The thing that won’t die, in the nightmare that won’t end.   The Terminator

40/ They’re here…    Polytergeist

41/ Work Sucks     Office Space

42/ This is the weekend they didn’t play golf.     Deliverance

43/ Deep below the blue surface, there lies a place no one has ever dreamed off….     The Abyss

44/ “For God’s sake, get out!”    The Amityville Horror

45/ His whole life was a million to one shot.      Rocky  

46/ You’ll Belive A Man Can fly!     Superman

47/ Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.      Schindler’s List 

48/ One man’s struggle to take it easy.       Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

49/ “You don’t get 500 million friends withot making a few enemies.     The Social Network

50/ The first casualty of war is innocence  Platoon

Mastermind Club 2020  Quiz No 5

A Shakespeare based quiz

1. Which play features two sets of twins called Antipholus and Dromio?       Comedy of Errors

2. ‘Enter Rumour, painted full of tongues.’  To which play does Rumour deliver the prologue?     Henry IV part 2

3. In The Merchant of Venice, what name does Portia adopt when she speaks in court in Antonio’s defence?     Balthasar

4. In which play is a Latin lesson used to create a comic scene?  Merry Wives of Windsor

5. The signature tune to The Apprentice was taken from a scene in the ballet based on which Shakespeare play?       Romeo & Juliet

6. Which person, mentioned by Shakespeare in a dedication, has been identified variously as the 3rd Earl of Pembroke, the 3rd Earl of Southampton or William Holme, an associate of Shakespeare’s publisher?                                                                                          ‘Mr W. H’, to whom the published version of the sonnets is dedicated

7. Which character delivers the ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech, and in which play?     Jaques, in As You Like It

8. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (also called Deeds of the Britons) seems to have been Shakespeare’s source for two plays. One is King Lear. What is the other?     Cymbeline

9. In Julius Caesar, which character delivers the speech which starts ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’?             Mark Antony

10. Which work by Berlioz is based on Much Ado about Nothing?      Beatrice and Benedict

11. In Twelfth Night, who is the steward in Olivia’s house?    Malvolio

12. Apart from Timon of Athens, one other Shakespeare play is set primarily in or around Athens. Which one?                                      A Midsummer Nights Dream                                      

13. In the opening scene of Macbeth, one of the witches says ‘Paddock calls’. In Shakespeare’s time, what sort of creature was referred to as ‘Paddock’?    Toad

14. ‘Prince of Tyre’ is the description of the title character of a Shakespeare play and appears in the full title of that play. What is this character’s name?        Pericles

15. In what professional capacity is Shakespeare’s father linked to the mother of crime and thriller writer Peter James?Both are/were glove-makers – Cornelia James was glove-maker to Queen Elizabeth II and John Shakespeare was a glover

16. The speech in which England is described as ‘this sceptred isle’ is part of the deathbed scene of a character in King Richard II. Which character delivers this speech?    John of Gaunt

17. In Hamlet, what is the name of Ophelia’s brother?   Laertes

18. In which war is Troilus and Cressida set?     Trojan

19. And who wrote the English poem (based mainly on a French source) which is generally believed to be Shakespeare’s main source for this play?     Chaucer

20. In Henry IV, what was the name of the tavern in Eastcheap frequented by Falstaff, Prince Hal and their friends?         Boar’s Head

21. ‘Upstart Crow’ is an insult levelled at Shakespeare in a posthumous pamphlet by Robert Greene. In Ben Elton’s Upstart Crow, David Mitchell plays Shakespeare – but who plays Greene?      Mark Heap

22. In The Taming of the Shrew, what is the name of Katharina’s milder-mannered sister?    Bianca

23. Which Terry Pratchett novel mixes a pastiche of theatre in Shakespeare’s time and a pastiche of Macbeth? Wyrd Sisters

24. Dogberry in All’s Well That Ends Well and Dull in Love’s Labour’s Lost both have the same profession. What is it?  Constable

25. In Henry V, what provocative present does the King of France send to Henry?    Tennis balls

26. Which 20th century writer’s play shares its title with the play performed before Claudius and Gertrude in Hamlet?              Agatha Christie – the play is called The Mousetrap

27. Which sonnet provides the title for the first in a series of books by H. E. Bates about an unconventional family?                      Sonnet 18, which starts ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ and contains the phrase ‘The darling buds of May’

28. ‘A plague on both your houses’ is said by a character who lies dying. To what ‘houses’ does the character refer?              Montague & Capulet

29. Richard II’s was called Barbary, and Richard III’s was called Surrey. What are we talking about?    Horses

30. Which Shakespearean character is the rightful Duke of Milan, deposed by his brother?   Prospero in The Tempest