It's Not All Greek to You Trivia Quiz

Answer: Delta

Rivers mouth into other rivers or into the sea. Where the freshwater from the river mixes with the tidal inflow of the seawater, an estuary is formed. This estuary can be a single wide water surface (such as is the case in most fjords) or can be truncated into several smaller branches of the river, with small alluvial islands separating the river branches.

The latter kind of estuary is named a delta, after the more or less triangular shape of the letter (resembling the capital letter delta). The Nile is one of the best known river deltas.

The Ganges-Brahmaputra is the largest river delta, with a surface of 105,000 kmē (41,000 square miles).

Answer: Alpha

When animals live in an organized group, there usually is some hierarchy. The most dominant male is the alpha male, and he gets most chances to feed and to mate with the females in the group. In most cases the dominant male is the fittest male of the group, thus likely to win any fight over rank. Maintaining the hierarchy thus benefits the community in limiting injuries related to interspecies fighting, and it also results in more offspring generated by the fittest animals, thus improving the chance of survival. On the other hand, an alpha male is usually the one who performs the most tasks in defending the community, which increases his stress level and will in the end be harmful to his fitness.

Answer: Zeta

Catherine Zeta Jones was born in Swansea, Wales in 1969. When she started her professional career, she added the hyphen between the two parts of her surname.
Zeta-Jones enrolled in the musical theatre in London at a young age, but broke through with the leading role in "42nd Street" in 1987. In 1990 she had her first movie role (Scheherazade in "Les 1001 Nuits", a box office flop). After her role as the daughter Kitty in the TV series "The Darling Buds of May" (1991-1993), she migrated to Hollywood. Here she played in "The Mask of Zorro" (1998) and "Entrapment" (1999).
In 2002 Catherine Zeta-Jones won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in "Chicago".

Answer: Nu

Nu is the French adjective (male) for naked. The female form is nue, and the plural is nus or nues.
The word nu is used in the title of several artworks by French artists. For instance, Marcel Duchamp titled one of his paintings "Nu descendant un escalier" ("Nude Descending a Staircase"), in which the orthography makes clear the portrayed person would be a male.
(In my opinion, the central focus of the painting does not resemble any person - even I who would fail a drawing exam for toddlers, would probably make clearer that it is a human figure).

Answer: Pi

The Canadian author Yann Martel is best known for his novel "The Life of Pi". In this novel, a sixteen year old Indian boy nicknamed Pi (short for his first name Piscine) experienced a shipwreck near Manila.
In a first version he told to the police, Pi shared his lifeboat with a hyena, an injured zebra, an orangutan and a tiger named Richard Parker. The hyena killed the zebra and the orangutan, and the tiger killed the hyena, and Pi and Richard Parker landed in Mexico more than two hundred days after the shipwreck.
In a second story he told the police, Pi shared the lifeboat with a cook, an injured sailor, and his mother, but after the sailor died the cook killed Pi's mother and Pi retaliated and killed the cook.
Then Pi challenged the police: as both stories were hard to believe and impossible to prove, which version did they prefer?

Answer: Gamma

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby of Marvel Comics invented in 1962 the superintelligent but shy scientist Bruce Banner, who developed a gamma bomb.
When testing a bomb, Banner rescued an unsuspecting bystander, but got hit by the full blast of gamma radiation. At first, he seemed to recover well. But then Banner noticed that on certain occasions his mind went blank and a huge, dim-witted, green monster appeared, wreaking havoc in search of a quiet place. After a while, Bruce Banner realised that the monster called "the Hulk" was his own alter ego, and that the physical transformation was provoked by intense emotions, especially anger.
In 1977 started a live-action television series with Bill Bixby as Bruce Banner and the body-builder Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk. The TV series coined the phrase "Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

Answer: Chi

2021 saw the first night of the movie "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings", the 25th movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the first one with a predominantly Asian look and feel.
The title character was Shang-Chi, a young Chinese trained in different (mostly Asian) martial arts. Shang-Chi's father Wenwu appointed him to avenge the murder of Shang-Chi's mother Ying Li. Shang-Chi understood that his father was leader of a crime syndicate (the "Ten Rings") and migrated to San Francisco. But as the Ten Rings attacked Shang-Chi and his girlfriend Katy, the hero travelled back to Macao to warn his sister Xiaoling.
Wenwu then captured Shang-Chi, Xiaoling and Katy, and went back to the village where he first met Ying Li. Ying Li's sister Ying Nan and the escaped prisoners then fought Wenwu, and several mythical creatures mixed in the fight.

Answer: Eta

The Euskadi Ta Askatasuna ("Basque Homeland and Liberty"), abbreviated ETA, was a group aiming at a Basque country independent from Spain and France. The ETA was founded in 1959 and soon adopted violence as its sole method to getting attention. The Spanish and French government, but also countries that were not directly involved (such as Canada and the USA) condemned the group as a terrorist gang.
ETA had the highest activity in the 1970s. Since 1980 their attacks lessened, and in 2018 they announced having completely disbanded.

Answer: Kappa

According to Japanese myth, the rivers and ponds are inhabited by kappa - humanoid green beings, the size of a toddler, with a turtle's carapace. Kappa rarely left the water.
The main weakness of a Kappa was its dish filled with water on top of its head. If the kappa's dish ran out of water, it became a quite feeble creature.
While in the water, kappa were known to commit various mischiefs: from looking under women's kimonos to killing and eating children. However, kappa preferred the cucumber for food.

Answer: Sigma

The uppercase Greek letter sigma is used in math (and also in spreadsheets) for the task of adding all the arguments up. In spreadsheets as Microsoft Excel, a command Σ(b1:b100) comes up with the sum of all values in the range from cell B1 to cell B100. In math, summation is used frequently to sum the results of a function for a variable that increases in steps of 1. So for instance Σ x =f(x), where one inserts below the capital sigma the starting point (for instance x=3) and above the sigma, the ending point (for instance 6).

Then we get the sum of all results for the function of x in the assumption that x would be 3, 4, 5 or 6 respectively.