A Bunch of Keys Trivia Quiz

Answer: Florida Keys

The Florida Keys start at the southeastern tip of the Florida peninsula. The chain of islands have a subtropical climate and are frost free all year round. They are a popular tourist destination, especially for scuba divers. The waters around the Keys are a Marine Conservation Site.

Many others come for the fishing. Ernest Hemingway lived on Key West for many years, and guided tours of his house are a popular tourist attraction.

Answer: Tower of London

The Ceremony of the Keys is the locking up of the Tower of London at night. It happens at exactly 9.53pm and has happened at that time, following exactly the same format, every night for at least the last 700 years. The Chief Yeoman Warder and the Tower of London Guard together secure the main gates.

There was one night during World War II when the ceremony was delayed by an air raid. There is a letter in the Tower archives from the Officer of the Guard apologising to the King for the lateness of the ceremony that night.

The King replied that the "officer was not to be punished as the delay was due to enemy action".

Answer: Three times a week

Big Ben is wound three times a week. An automatic winding mechanism deals with the striking and chiming trains. A manual winding handle is attached to the train that keeps the clock going, and this is then wound manually. At the same time everything is oiled to keep it in good working order. If the time needs adjusting at all, then old pennies are added to or removed from the pendulum to regulate the clock.

The man in charge of making sure the clock keeps time, keeps going and is in good working order is known as The Keeper of the Clock.

Answer: Enigma

If sending in code to an ally, then both parties will have the key to the code. This can be a table of numbers substituting for letters, or a book in which numbers in the code refer to certain pages and words. Without this key codes can be broken, but it takes a lot of time and effort. During World War II, Germany was sending messages using the Enigma machine to code them.

In 1942, a German submarine was disabled, and before she sank an Enigma machine and code books were removed from her. These were sent to Bletchley Park in England, the centre of code breaking operations.

The capture of the machine was vital to the war effort. In later years, Winston Churchill said that the capture of this machine probably shortened the war by some two years.

Answer: Nora Roberts

The "Key Trilogy" is a blend of romantic and fantasy fiction. Three women are invited to undertake a quest. They must find three keys to unlock the prisons of three sisters. They have been imprisoned by a spell case by an evil god. The people asking them to undertake this quest are not of our world, they come from the world of the imprisoned sisters. Each of the women will have one month, from new moon to the moon going dark, to find their key. Failure by one means the whole quest will fail and the women will loose a year of their lives. In the course of the quest they must fight evil, but they also find love.

Nora Roberts is a prolific author. Many of her romances have a fantasy element to them. She also writes the futuristic "In Death" series of thrillers as J.D. Robb.

Answer: The Keys of the Kingdom

An orphan who enters the priesthood after the death of his childhood sweetheart, Gregory Peck plays Father Francis Chisholm. He is sent to China to establish a Catholic parish. He finds disinterest, outright hostility, disease and famine. Things become a little easier after he cares for the son of a local Mandarin, who gives him land and money to build a church, schoolhouse and dispensary. Over the course of many years work he builds a congregation and becomes accepted by the local population. He returns to his native Scotland in his old age. He no longer fits the church in the United Kingdom, and his Bishop sends a Monseigneur to tell him to retire. The Monseigneur finds his diaries and sits reading them through the night. The story is told through the medium of the diaries.

The film is based on the 1941 book of the same name by A.J. Cronin.

Answer: Nosebleed

A cold key or bunch of keys applied to the back of the neck is a very old home remedy for stopping a nosebleed. Some people say press the key against the back of the neck, others say drop a bunch of keys down the back of your shirt. Yet another suggestion is run a cold butter knife along your spine.

The main point, no matter which method you adopt, is that the key/knife has to be cold enough to encourage the blood vessels to shrink and stop bleeding. As someone who used to suffer from nosebleed I can confirm that the key remedy isn't reliable. Cold water to the face or direct pressure to the bridge of the nose works much better.

Answer: Skeleton key

Skeleton keys are rarely found these days as locks have become too complex for them to open. Locks used to have things called wards inside them, and the key to open them was cut to the same shape as the wards. A key with the wrong shape wards would not fit and turn.

Answer: Arch

The keystone is the piece that sits at the top of the arch and locks it all into place. It makes it self supporting. Because of the importance of this particular piece, many are larger than the surrounding brick or stone work, and often have a coat of arms or some other decoration carved or embossed onto them.

As well as stone and brick arches, they can also be found in arched ceilings, again making the whole arch self supporting. They are usually wedge shaped, tapering at the bottom. Renaissance architecture, which relies heavily on shape and symmetry, made extensive use of the keystone technique.

Answer: Mack Sennett

The Keystone Cops first appeared in 1912 in a silent movie called "Hoffmeyer's Legacy". They quickly shifted from their own films to appearing in films with Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and other stars of the day. No major silent film was complete without a chase sequence featuring these policemen falling over each other, driving off a cliff, and always failing to catch their man.

They appeared in movies well into the 1920s, but by the time talking films arrived their popularity had passed.

There was no set line up of actors for the Cops, or indeed set number. In their first film there were seven of them, but there could be ten or twelve, it depended on how many silent actors were free to be pressed into service.