Harry Potter: How to Avoid Magical Disaster Quiz

Answer: Boa constrictor

At the start of the first novel in the 'Harry Potter' series, Harry was ten years old and yet to discover that he was a wizard. On an outing to the zoo for his cousin Dudley's birthday, Harry came across a boa constrictor in one of the glass enclosures in the reptile house and got the surprise of his life when it winked at him and started responding to his questions. He got a further shock when Dudley knocked him over in order to get a closer look at the snake and the glass of the enclosure disappeared, leaving the snake free to escape. He also thought he'd heard the snake thanking him in a "low, hissing voice"! It wasn't until much later in the series that both Harry and the reader discovered that his ability to talk to snakes came from Lord Voldemort's horcrux that resided in Harry's famous lightning bolt scar.

Harry also suffered a further bout of accidental magic at the start of the third novel, 'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban', when his Aunt Marge started insulting his parents and his anger caused him to unintentionally blow her up like a balloon.

Answer: Gilderoy Lockhart

Gilderoy Lockhart was the new Defence Against the Dark Arts professor in 'Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets'. He was a best-selling author of books detailing his magical adventures (such as "Voyages with Vampires" and "Wanderings with Werewolves") but turned out to be largely incompetent when called on to perform pretty much any type of magic once he arrived at Hogwarts. The reason for this turned out to be that he was only really skilled at performing memory charms, which he used to take the credit for the achievements of a whole range of unfortunate witches and wizards.

Lockhart's downfall came when he was forced to accompany Harry and Ron Weasley on their mission to save Ron's sister Ginny from the Chamber of Secrets. He stole Ron's wand - which was only held together with spellotape after being damaged when Ron and Harry crashed a flying car into the Whomping Willow - and attempted to use it to obliviate both boys. The broken wand "exploded with the force of a small bomb" and the spell backfired on its caster and removed Lockhart's memories instead. In 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix' it was revealed that Lockhart had ended up as a long-term resident of the Janus Thickey ward at St. Mungo's, which cared for the victims of permanent spell damage. The incorrect answer options were all other residents of that ward.

Answer: She added a cat hair to it

In 'Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets', Harry, Ron and Hermione hatched a plan to use Polyjuice Potion to impersonate Draco Malfoy's friends in order to trick him into revealing evidence that he was the "Heir of Slytherin" responsible for opening the titular chamber and setting free the mysterious monster rumoured to live in it. Hermione Granger was the most skilled and competent witch in Harry's class at Hogwarts and, as expected, she was perfectly capable of following the instructions and brewing the complicated and difficult potion. However, the final step before drinking it involved adding in a hair belonging to the person who you wanted to become. Ron and Harry successfully transformed into Draco Malfoy's friends Crabbe and Goyle using hair they had stolen from their targets directly, but Hermione used a hair that had got caught on her robes while fighting with Slytherin student Millicent Bulstrode and it turned out that it actually came from Millicent Bulstrode's cat.

This mishap had the undesired effect of leaving Hermione stuck as a half-transformed cat, complete with black fur on her face, pointy ears and a tail. She had to spend over a month in the school's hospital wing before the damage was eventually undone.

Answer: They will die

Mandrakes were the subject of one of the herbology lessons in 'Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets'. During the class the students discovered that mandrake plants consist of a small green creature with leaves growing out of its head and that when pulled from the soil the creatures emit a scream that is fatal to anyone that hears it. Luckily Professor Sprout had equipped her students with noise-cancelling earmuffs and, even if any of them had failed to put them on properly, the mandrakes they were tasked with repotting were babies - whose screams were only capable of knocking a human unconscious for a few hours.

The mandrakes turned out to have particular significance later in the plot as one use of mandrake root is in the cure for petrification - the state of frozen animation suffered by the cat Mrs Norris, Colin Creevey, Justin Finch-Fletchley and Hermione Granger after a close encounter with the chamber's resident basilisk.

Mandrakes weren't the only dangerous plants to make an appearance in the 'Harry Potter' series. In the first book Harry, Ron and Hermione encountered a Devil's Snare that coiled round them and started squeezing them to death, and another Devil's Snare did kill Broderick Bode in 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix'. The Whomping Willow tree in the Hogwarts grounds was also capable of inflicting serious injury.

Answer: He insulted Buckbeak

Draco Malfoy's altercation with Buckbeak the hippogriff occurred during Hagrid's first Care of Magical Creatures lesson with the Gryffindor and Slytherin third-years in 'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban'. Hagrid shared a number of tips for how to successfully interact with a hippogriff with the class, the first and most important of which was the need to be polite and respectful to them at all times, or, as Hagrid actually put it "Don't never insult one, 'cause it might be the last thing yeh do". Others included maintaining eye contact and not blinking too much when you approach one; the need to bow and wait for it to reciprocate before trying to touch it; and not pulling too hard on its feathers while riding one.

Unfortunately Malfoy didn't pay sufficient attention to this advice and, while he did remember to bow to Buckbeak, he also chose to call him an "ugly great brute". Buckbeak instantly retaliated by using his sharp talons to cut a deep gash down Malfoy's arm and the lesson ended in chaos with Malfoy being rushed to the hospital wing. The incident led to Malfoy's father having Buckbeak put on trial and ultimately sentenced to death, proving that a failure to care properly for magical creatures can have serious repercussions for the animal as well as the offending witch or wizard.

Answer: Unintended transfiguration

St. Mungo's gives injured and sick witches and wizards a choice of going to five different floors of the hospital for treatment for ailments of various causes, as well as the opportunity to visit the fifth floor for the tearoom and hospital shop. The ground floor treats "artefact accidents", the first floor is the destination for "creature-induced injuries", the second floor is for "magical bugs" (the only one relating to illness rather than disasters) and the third floor deals with "potion and plant poisoning".

The St. Mungo's floor guide for spell damage actually states "unliftable jinxes, hexes, incorrectly applied charms, etc.". That final catch all would cover the much more unusual, but more devastating, effects of the long-term spell damage managed on the Janus Thickey ward.

Answer: Vanishing cabinet

The vanishing cabinet question stood somewhere on the first floor of Hogwarts Castle during the events of 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix'. Graham Montague was a Slytherin student who played on his house quidditch team and became a member of Dolores Umbridge's Inquisitorial Squad. It was while he was using his Inquisitorial Squad powers to try and take house points from Fred and George Weasley that they grabbed him and stuffed him into the vanishing cabinet in the hope of getting rid of him for a few weeks before he found his way out.

The long-term significance of this event didn't become clear until the end of the next book, 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince'. Montague had told Draco Malfoy about his harrowing experience, including that he had heard nearby events from both Hogwarts and Borgin and Burke's shop in Knockturn Alley while stuck in the broken cabinet. Malfoy realised that the vanishing cabinet was paired with another in the shop and the two could be used as a means of transport between two locations. He just needed to repair the broken one at Hogwarts and was then able to use them to bring a squad of Death Eaters into the castle as part of his plan to murder the headmaster Albus Dumbledore.

Answer: Deceleration

Apparition is a form of almost instantaneous magical transportation from one place to another, but it isn't particularly comfortable. Harry Potter described it as like being "forced through a very tight rubber tube" after he first experienced it when Professor Dumbledore took him to visit Horace Slughorn via side-along apparition at the start of 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince'. It is even less comfortable if it goes wrong and the witch or wizard in question ends up being splinched. Therefore, due to the obvious dangers, apparition is restricted to those aged 17 and over who have passed the Apparition Test and gained their license.

Harry, Ron and Hermione attended apparition lessons that started after the Christmas holidays of their sixth year at Hogwarts. The instructor, Wilkie Twycross, revealed the "three Ds" required for successful apparition: destination - concentrating on where you want to go; determination - the strength of your desire to be at your destination; and deliberation - moving to your destination with purpose. Their first lesson also provided an introduction to splinching when Susan Bones apparated but her left leg didn't. Twycross blamed the problem on a lack of sufficient determination.

Hermione passed her apparition test, Ron failed his for splinching after leaving half an eyebrow behind and Harry was unable to take it as he didn't turn 17 until after the end of the school year.

Answer: Xenophilius Lovegood

Described as "an enormous, grey spiral horn", the erumpent horn was on display in the living room of Xenophilius Lovegood's house when Harry, Ron and Hermione visited him there during the events of 'Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows'. Hermione was able to identify it by the "grooved markings around the base" after reading about the highly explosive objects in the book 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them'. However, Lovegood was a very eccentric wizard who believed in several peculiar-sounding creatures (whose existence was not considered likely by the wider wizarding community) and refused to accept that he wasn't in ownership of part of something called a crumple-horned snorkack or heed Hermione's warning about the danger the artefact posed to his home.

It soon transpired that Lovegood's daughter Luna had been kidnapped on the orders of Lord Voldemort and that Lovegood was trying to turn Harry, Ron and Hermione over to the Death Eaters in an effort to secure her freedom. He fired a stunning spell at the trio, which hit the erumpent horn instead - causing it to blow up and take a large chunk of the house with it. On the plus side, the explosion provided a sufficient distraction for Hermione to get herself and her friends to safety.

Answer: Never tickle a sleeping dragon

Like many institutions, both muggle and magical, Hogwarts has a Latin motto. The wording translates into English as "Never tickle a sleeping dragon", which may be helpful advice for any witch or wizard planning to take up dragon keeping as a career, or for the goblins of Gringotts to help with the care of their dragon (prior to it being used to help Harry, Hermione and Ron to escape the bank after their raid on the Lestrange vault!). The motto doesn't get a direct mention in any of the novels, but it is written on the Hogwarts crest that is used to illustrate most editions and mentioned by Albus Dumbledore in his foreword to 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them'.

The incorrect options relate to the ways Cedric Diggory, Fleur Delacour and Viktor Krum tried to defeat their dragons in the first task of the Triwizard Tournament in 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire'. Cedric transfigured a rock into a labrador, which failed to fully distract his dragon; Fleur tried to lull hers to sleep but got singed when it snored and shot fire at her; and Krum fired a conjunctivitis spell at his dragon's eye, causing it to thrash wildly in pain.