Just 17, Do You Know What I Mean? Online Trivia

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. The title of this quiz (Just 17, if you know what I mean) is a direct lift from the first line of which song?

Answer: I Saw Her Standing There - The Beatles

"I Saw Her Standing There" (Lennon/McCartney) is the opening track of the first Beatles album, "Please Please Me" (1963). The song was originally titled "Seventeen". The wrong options are also real songs.

2. Abraham Lincoln, attacked on April 14th 1865 and died a day later, was the 16th president of the USA. Who succeeded him?

Answer: Andrew Johnson

Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), Andrew Johnson (1865-1869), William Howard Taft (1909-1913) and Richard Milhous Nixon (1969-1974) are the 7th, 17th, 27th and 37th presidents of the USA respectively.

Andrew Johnson was Abraham Lincoln's vice president and replaced him the day he died. No wonder he did not have a vice president himself.

3. Which of the following tidbits about the number 17 is NOT true?

Answer: It is the number of lines in a sonnet

A sonnet has 14 lines. But who cares about 14 in this party? A Japanese haiku poem has 17 onji ("syllables"), ordered 5-7-5.

The Magicicada Cassini is one of three cicada species of North America known to have a 17-year life cycle (four other species have a 13-year life cycle). Its common name is the "seventeen year locust" (although it's not a locust!).

Useful info - if you are in France and in trouble, dial 17 (fluency in French is recommended as well :-).

4. In Italy, 17 is associated with bad luck. The common explanation for this is that the Roman numeral representation of 17 (XVII) can be anagrammed to VIXI. What is so scary about the word VIXI?

Answer: It's Latin for "I have lived" (i.e. "I am no longer living...")

Some buildings in Italy "omit" the 17th floor. Alitalia does not have a number 17 seat in its planes. Friday the 17th has the same status in Italy as Friday the 13th has in the USA.

Roman culture may have borrowed this superstition from the Pythagoreans who were horrified by 17 and nicknamed it "evil", "obstruction", "opposition" and "the day that the Devil triumphed over God".

The wrong options in this question are all nonsensical.

5. In Internet standards, network port 17 is reserved for a peculiar network service. This service was occasionally used for one of the first computerized Quizzing applications. What is the acronym of this service (hint: a certain letter should give you the lead)?

Answer: QOTD

Quote Of The Day service is used by system administrators to spread a short message, a pun, a proverb, or a philosophical credo to all users logging in their system on a given day.

Some creative administrators used it to publish a daily riddle or quiz, hence it is also called Quiz Of The Day (the hint referred to the letter Q). Nowadays it is of less use of course. We have FunTrivia after all.

SMTP is a standard protocol for e-mail communication (using port 25). HTTPS is used for secure web pages (using port 443). SSH is a protocol for encrypted communication between remote hosts (using port 22).

A reserved port is also known as a well-known port number. More interesting info on well-known port numbers can be found in the eponymous quiz authored by yours truly.

6. The following mathematical expression always yields a prime number. N^2-N+17 Where N is a natural number (1,2,3,...) and N^2 means N squared.

Answer: False

If you tried substituting N=1,2,3,4,...., stopped before 17, and answered True - you were unlucky. Sorry about that.

17 is known as an Euler lucky number. This means that the expression N^2-N+17 yields a prime number for all N smaller than 17. For N=17 it yields 17^2-17+17=17^2=289 which is not prime. There is a total of 6 Euler lucky numbers: 2,3,5,7,11,17,41. For more info: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LuckyNumberofEuler.html

7. Which band released the album "Seventeen Seconds" in 1980?

Answer: The Cure

"Seventeen Seconds" is The Cure's second album released in 1980 by Fiction Records. It also contains a song by the same name, which was used as the title song of a "Grey's Anatomy" episode. The album was ranked 65 in Q magazine's list of top 100 British records (2000). The Cure's first single was released by Small Wonder Records, to which I have dedicated a full quiz.

The wrong options are all real band names. If numerical band names are your kick, you are invited to try my Pastime With Numerical Band Names quiz.

8. German neurologist Korbinian Brodmann studied the human cortex and perceived that it is organized in anatomically distinctive regions. The brain region he named "area 17" was especially studied later. One of the researches of Area 17 led to a Nobel prize for medicine. What is the main function of Brodmann area 17?

Answer: Visual perception

Area 17 is also referred to as Primary Visual Cortex, Striate Cortex and Area V1. It is located in the occipital lobe (back of the head) and receives its input from the eyes via the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus. It performs primary visual information processing, like extracting edges from a row of points, and sending its output to other areas that extract shapes and colors.

American neuroscientists David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel won the Nobel prize for medicine in 1981, on their research of area 17.

For more interesting facets of human Visual Perception please check my quiz dedicated to the subject.

9. This biblical figure was 600 years, 2 months and 17 days old when the major event of his life started. Who is he and what is the event?

Answer: Noah and the deluge

Genesis 7:11-12 (KJV): "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.".

In Judaism, the seven Noahide commandments represent the essence of requirements from a righteous human being regardless of their actual religious faith. A religious Jew has to follow 613 Mitzvahs, whereas the "seven Mitzvahs of the sons of Noah" are universal. The Talmudic version of the Noahide commandments include monotheism and the prohibition of idolatry, prohibition of murder, prohibition of theft, prohibition of adultery, prohibition of blasphemy, prohibition of cruelty to animals and the requirement to have just laws.

10. The divisibility rule for 17 is as follows: take the last digit of the number under test and multiply it by 5, then subtract the result from the number formed from the number's remaining digits. Repeat the process. If at the end you get 0, 17 or -17, then the number is evenly divisible by 17. Which of the following numbers is evenly divisible by 17?

Answer: all of them

2006: from 2006 you get to 200-6*5=170 and then 17-0*5=17.
969: from 969 you get to 96-9*5=51 and then 5-1*5=0.
1111111111111111: your homework for the day :-).

If divisibility rules tickle your fancy, I have a quiz dedicated to a few of them.

Thanks for taking my quiz, hopefully it will lure you to take another one or two, all the best and may the 17 be with you!

Source: Author gentlegiant17

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor trident before going online.
Any errors found in FunTrivia content are routinely corrected through our feedback system.

Just 17, Do You Know What I Mean? Quiz

As my nick hints, I have a peculiar liking to the number 17. Hence, my 17th quiz is dedicated to this adorable number. Please join in my little party.

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>