Well! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Adam and Eve

As recounted in the book of Genesis chapters two to five of the Bible's Old Testament, Adam was the first person created by God and God placed him in the Garden of Eden to care for it. The Garden contained many trees and God told Adam he could eat the fruit from any of them except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which was in the middle of the Garden near the tree of life.

All living creatures were brought to Adam to be named then, while he was asleep, God made Eve from a rib of Adam's to be his wife. They were happy in the Garden of Eden until a serpent spoke to Eve and persuaded her to eat fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. She gave some to Adam but once the couple had eaten they realised they were naked and made themselves clothes from fig leaves sewn together. When God came into the Garden they hid and Adam explained to God that he was afraid because he was naked. God asked Adam how he knew this and whether he had eaten from the tree that had been forbidden to him. Adam said Eve had given him the fruit and in turn Eve explained how the serpent had deceived her into doing what she did.

God cursed the serpent so that it had to crawl on its belly and to be loathed from then on and he told Eve that she would find childbirth painful and would be subservient to her husband. Adam was told that he would always have to work hard to grow crops as the soil would not be good. God made clothes for them but banished them from the Garden so they could not eat from tree of life and become immortal like him.

Answer: Archimedes

The Greek scientist, inventor, astronomer and mathematician Aristotle lived in the third century BC and made many discoveries. King Hieron II of Syracuse gave him the task of finding out whether a goldsmith was cheating him by using silver in a supposedly pure gold crown. Archimedes did not record in writing how he solved the problem but others did. Among them the first century BC Roman engineer and writer Vitruvius recounted how, while Archimedes was working on a solution to the problem, he had a brainwave while he was in the bath. He realised that the amount by which the water level rose when something was put into it could be used to determine what kind of substance the object consisted of.

Archimedes was so excited by this discovery that he leaped from the bath and ran along the streets naked while shouting 'Eureka!', which translates into English as 'I have found it!'. He had apparently realised that submerging the crown would displace an amount of liquid equal to its own volume, as he displaced bathwater equal to his own volume. Once the volume of the displaced water, and thus of the crown/object, was found then its density (how compact it was) could be calculated by dividing the object's mass by the volume of water it displaced.

Gold and silver have different densities so that gold weighs about twice as much as silver. Thus the crown's density would be lower than that of gold if a cheaper metal had been added and Archimedes found that this was the case.

Some later writers, including Galileo, have speculated that Archimedes may instead have used his own Archimedes Principle, or law of buoyancy, to solve the problem. This states that an immersed object experiences a buoyant upward force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces. Thus any difference between the buoyancy of the crown and of the same weight of pure gold would have shown up and this may have been an easier method of solving the problem. However, the later scientists do not deny that the Eureka moment happened, even though differently caused.

Answer: Mary Magdalene

As described in all four of the Gospels at the beginning of the Bible's New Testament, Mary Magdalene was a Galilean from Magdala who Jesus had healed. She became one of the people who followed Jesus and his twelve disciples as they travelled around the towns and villages in the Galilean Sea area preaching.

The four Gospels agree that she accompanied Jesus to Jerusalem for the Passover and was present at his crucifixion alongside Mary the mother of Jesus and the disciple John. Along with other women, Mary was also present when Joseph of Arimathea took Jesus' body and, helped by Nicodemus, wrapped it in linen, laid it in a tomb cut into a rock and rolled a stone across the entrance.

The next day was the Sabbath and again all the Gospels agree that on the day after Mary went to Jesus' tomb very early and saw that the stone was removed. The Gospels differ slightly over details of this episode but agree that Mary was the first, or among the first, to see Jesus after his resurrection and to tell the remaining disciples. Mark's Gospel (chapters 15 and 16) records her as being accompanied by another woman to the tomb, where they saw angels who told them that Jesus was risen. Later Jesus appeared first to Mary and told her to tell the eleven disciples, which she did.

Bible experts have concluded that Matthew and Luke were aware of Mark's Gospel when they later wrote theirs. Both mainly agree with Mark's account but Luke (chapters 23 and 24) states that, when the disciples were told, Peter went to the tomb and verified Jesus was not there. Matthew (chapter 28) writes that the angels also showed the women the empty tomb and that they saw Jesus while already on their way to tell the disciples.

John (chapter 20) tells of Mary Magdalene going to the tomb alone, seeing the tomb was opened and telling the disciples, who came and verified this then went away. Mary stayed at the tomb weeping and saw angels inside who asked her why she was crying. She said it was because Jesus was not inside then she turned and saw a man standing there who also asked why she was crying. He revealed himself as Jesus and instructed her to tell the disciples that he was ascending to God and she did this.

Answer: Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) was born in Genoa and learned navigation when he was a young sailor. He later devised a plan to sail westwards to the Orient in order to profit from the lucrative spice trade. It was known that the earth is spherical and Columbus calculated that the distance by sea from the Canary Islands to Japan was about 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometres).

Columbus proposed his plan of sailing westwards to the East Indies to King John II of Portugal in about 1484 then to Queen Isabella of Spain in about 1486. In both cases the monarchs rejected it on advice that he seriously underestimated the distance because other navigators had estimated it as several times that far. The others were correct as it is actually 12,200 miles (19,600 kilometres) but a few years later in 1492 Columbus' further appeal was accepted by Queen Isabella, who was persuaded by the king's clerk, as was King Ferdinand, to finance the voyage before Columbus took his possibly lucrative ideas elsewhere.

In August 1492 Columbus left Castile, Spain with three ships and made landfall on 12th October on an island in the Bahamas, known at that time by its native inhabitants as Guanahani and now known as San Salvador. He then visited several other islands including those now known as Hispaniola and Cuba, which he mistook for China according to his diaries. Columbus returned to Castile in early 1493 and word of his voyage soon spread across Europe. In Columbus' letter about the first voyage, published following his return to Spain, he claimed that he had reached Asia.

Columbus made three further voyages to the Americas and nearby islands, exploring several Caribbean islands in 1493-6, Trinidad and the northern coast of South America in 1498-1500 and the east coast of Central America in 1502-4. It is uncertain whether Columbus was really aware that he had actually reached new lands, as he never definitely retracted his belief that he had reached the Far East. Although he did not find the spices he sought though, sponsoring his voyages turned out to be lucrative for Spain and its monarchs.

Answer: Isaac Newton

An outbreak of bubonic plague in 1665 caused scientist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) to move back from Cambridge University, where he had been studying, to his mother's home in Lincolnshire for two years. Although he may have been thinking about the matter before, his theory of gravitation was formulated in this time and he often related how a key event in this was seeing an apple fall from a tree in his mother's garden.

Among written accounts of the event, the writer Voltaire, having been told about it by Newton's niece, described Newton having 'the first thought of his system of gravitation upon seeing an apple falling from a tree' in 'Essay on Epic Poetry' (1727). Newton's friend William Stukeley recorded in his 'Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life' (1752) that on 15 April, 1726: 'he told me the notion of gravitation came into his mind when in a garden. ''Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, the reason is, that the earth draws it. there must be a drawing power'''. (Original punctuation retained.)

Continuing to work on his initial idea, Newton deduced that the power of gravity was not limited to a certain distance from earth, but must extend much further. Over the next two decades he developed his theory into the law of universal gravitation, which stated that the motion of objects both on Earth and on other planets could be accounted for by the same principles.

His book 'Philosophić Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy)' (1687) consolidated many of his previous findings in different areas. In the book Newton used his mathematical description of gravity to account for a number of things, including tides and the trajectories of projectiles and of comets. This law of universal gravitation became a dominant scientific viewpoint for several centuries.

Answer: William Bligh

In 1787 the then Lieutenant William Bligh (1754-1817), who was an officer in the Royal Navy, took command of His Majesty's Armed Vessel Bounty. He was given the task of collecting breadfruit trees from Tahiti and transporting them eastwards across the South Pacific to the West Indies. In Tahiti Bligh and his crew had to wait over five months for the breadfruit to mature and the crew apparently had an easy life there.

The Bounty left Tahiti on 4th April, 1789, and on 28th April a mutiny by up to twenty-five crew members was led by Bligh's second-in-command, Fletcher Christian. Bligh and Christian had hitherto been good friends and it is speculated that they fell out with each other. The mutiny took Bligh by surprise and he was captured, after which the crewmen loyal to him did not oppose the mutineers. The latter put Bligh and eighteen of the loyal sailors into an overloaded small ship's launch with only a few weapons, a few days' provisions and some navigation instruments.

Bligh decided to sail for Timor, the nearest European base in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), which was 4,614 miles (6,701 kilometres) away. The voyage took 47 days, quite a few of them with very little food, and Bligh and his men reached Timor on 14th June, 1789. They went on to Batavia (now Jakarta) on the island of Java then back to England, where they arrived in March 1790.

The reasons for the mutiny are unclear as some sources report that Bligh was a tyrant who illtreated his crew while others argue that Bligh was no worse than the average naval captain. In fact, Bounty's log shows that Bligh was relatively sparing in his physical punishments of the crew. However, he was reported as being verbally abusive to them and having an intolerant manner, while it has also been suggested that the mutineers wanted to return to Tahiti and a life of ease.

The mutineers did travel back to Tahiti and some crewmen stayed there while Christian and the others sailed further away and their descendants were later found on Pitcairn Island. Upon learning of the mutiny, the Royal Navy sent the vessel Pandora to Tahiti, where some mutineers were captured, brought back to England and tried.

In October 1790 Bligh was honourably acquitted by a court-martial inquiry into the loss of the Bounty. He remained in the Royal Navy and was promoted several times, finally being appointed Vice-Admiral of the Blue on 4th June, 1814.

Answer: Robert Falcon Scott

In the early twentieth century parties of explorers tried to reach the South Pole on Antarctica. Among them was a party led by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (1872-1928) and another led by the British naval officer and explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912). The latter had already made an unsuccessful attempt at reaching the South Pole between 1901 and 1904, but obtained more funding and assembled a new team in order to make a second attempt.

In June 1910 Amundsen and his party sailed from Norway and Scott and his party sailed from Cardiff. Amundsen had kept his true intentions secret and Scott only found out about Amundsen's real goal in October 1910 after landing in Melbourne, Australia. On 14th January, 1911, the Norwegians landed at the Bay of Whales in Antarctica while Scott's party had reached Antarctica on 4th January, 1911, but had landed at McMurdo Sound, which was 60 miles further from the South Pole than the Bay of Whales was. Both sets of explorers only set out overland for the South Pole after the Antarctic winter was over with Amundsen's group starting out on 18th October, 1911, and Scott's setting out on 1st November, 1911. Although each had a back-up team to support the attempt, both leaders decided on being accompanied by only four men on the last part of their journeys.

The Norwegian party were the more expert in travelling over frozen terrain and on 14th December, 1911, they reached the South Pole. They stayed there for two days before starting their return and their whole party arrived back at their base camp on 25th January, 1912. Scott's party had problems on their journey and he and his four companions reached the South Pole on 17th January, 1912. There they found the tent and messages that Amundsen's party had left for them.

Scott's party began their return journey on 19th January, 1912, and made good progress at first. However, Petty Officer Evans was injured and died on 17th February, 1912, and the badly frost-bitten Captain Oates walked out of his tent on 17th March, 1912, and was not seen again. The weather had deteriorated and fewer provisions than expected were found in the supply depots set up for the returning explorers, while a planned meeting with supporting dog teams from the base camp failed to take place. On 19 March, 1912, Scott, Dr Wilson and Lieutenant Bowers made camp some 12.5 miles (20.1 kilometres) away from their next supply depot. From the next day onwards a fierce blizzard prevented them from travelling further and during the next nine days they grew weaker as their supplies ran out. They died on, or just after, 29th March, 1912, the day on which Scott made his final diary entry and their bodies were only discovered by a search party seven months and a half months later on 12th November, 1912.

Answer: Alexander Fleming

In 1928 the research scientist and physician Dr Alexander Fleming (1881-1955) was conducting experiments in a laboratory in St Mary's Hospital, London, to investigate the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus. He went away on holiday for two weeks and returned to find one of the bacteria cultures he had left was in a dish with an opened lid. Part of it was surrounded by a greenish mould and he observed that the mould seemed to be preventing the bacteria by it from growing.

Fleming grew more of the mould and, from conducting experiments, found out that it could produce an anti-bacterial chemical which killed a number, but not all, types of bacteria that cause serious illnesses in humans. He isolated this chemical and named the mould 'Penicillium notatum' and the antibacterial component 'penicillin'. He also established that the mould needed to exist before the bacterium started to reproduce because the penicillin was effective through inhibiting its growth.

Fleming first presented his discovery on 13th February, 1929, to the Medical Research Club and published it in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology on 10th May, 1929. Neither his talks nor articles received any serious interest until the late 1930s when researchers at the University of Oxford, led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, began building on Fleming's work in their 'Penicillin Project'. They isolated, cultivated and purified penicillin and by 1941 an injectable form of it was available. However, like Fleming, these scientists were only able to produce a fairly small amount of penicillin so they requested assistance from other bodies. Both the United States Department of Agriculture and the private sector helped to locate and produce new strains and to develop mass production techniques so that by the mid 1940s usable quantities of penicillin became available.

Since then penicillin has saved millions of lives and is still one of the most widely used antibiotics. It is effective against many things, such as bacterial infection in wounds, throat infections, meningitis and syphilis. As Fleming discovered very early though, bacteria can develop resistance to an antibiotic and this has happened, and still is happening, so that ever-newer antibacterial agents are having to be developed.

Fleming, Florey and Chain were jointly awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Fleming also received many other awards, including a knighthood from King George VI in 1944 and the Medal for Merit from President Truman of the United States in 1947. In 1999 'Time' magazine designated him as one of the 'Twentieth Century's 100 Most Important People' and in 2002 he was selected as one of the '100 Greatest Britons' in a poll by the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Although Fleming and other researchers were not aware of this, a French scientist named Ernest Duchesne had earlier carried out research into some moulds' possible anti-bacterial qualities. He found that guinea pigs injected with bacterial diseases and with cultures containing penicillin glaucum survived. His resulting 1896 doctoral thesis was not given publicity but his work was rediscovered later and he was posthumously honoured in 1949.

Answer: Roger Bannister

When accurate timings began in the mid nineteenth century athletes were recorded as running a mile in some 4 and a half minutes but over the next decades ever faster times were gradually achieved. For instance, in 1923 a new world record time was set by the Finn Paavo Nurmi, who ran a mile in 4 minutes 10.4 seconds. A later world record was established by the Swede Gunder Haegg, who managed 4 minutes 1.4 seconds in 1945 and this record stood for years, although it seemed to athletes that running a mile in less than 4 minutes should be possible.

In contrast, scientists and other experts had long been stating that there were limits to how fast a human could run and that an under-4-minute mile would remain unachievable. Among them the physiologist Archibald Hill wrote in "Proceedings of the Royal Society of London" in 1926 that attempting the feat could cause a runner an injury and included data to show that he would also run up an oxygen debt and not have the energy to finish. The coach Brutus Hamilton published "The Ultimate of Human Effort" in 1935, which listed the limits for achievements in different events. He included analyses and statistics to show that the fastest possible time for the mile was 4 minutes 1.6 seconds.

This belief persisted among many experts into the early 1950s but a number of other scientists were of the opinion that the 4-minute mile was safely achievable. For instance, one such scientist, Alfred Francis, had predicted in the journal, "Science" in 1943 that the 'hypothetical four minute mile' was an 'imminent possibility'.

This 'possibility' became a realised fact on 6th May, 1954, when there was an athletic meeting between British Amateur Athletic Association and Oxford University athletes at Iffley Road Track in Oxford. A medical student and international middle-distance runner named Roger Bannister (1929-2018) had planned an attempt to run a sub-4-minute mile there. He was assisted by two pace-makers and the first, Chris Brasher, set the pace for the first two of the four laps of the race then the other pace-maker, Chris Chataway, took over part way through the third lap. Bannister went into the lead about half way through the fourth lap and stayed there to finish the race in a time of 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. Later Bannister confirmed that he had been told by physiologists that not only was running the 4-minute mile impossible, but that attempting to do so could be fatal for the runner.

Bannister retired from athletics later in 1954 to concentrate on his career in medicine but his sub-four-minute mile was voted thirteenth in a "100 Greatest Sporting Moments" poll in 2002 by the UK television Channel 4. The world record time for running a mile continued to fall gradually after Bannister's achievement until the end of the century, when it was held by the Moroccan Hicham El Guerrouj, who achieved a time of 3 minutes 43.13 seconds on July 7, 1999.
(the 3:50 barrier was broken on 12th August, 1965, when John Walker of New Zealand ran a time of 3:48.4)

Answer: The Beatles

The Beatles pop group was formed in 1960 and by 1962 its members were John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Pete Best. They had an audition with Decca Records on 1st January, 1962, but the record company refused them a contract because they believed that guitar groups were on the way out.

Three months later the Beatles were signed to EMI's Parlophone record label; Ringo Starr took over from Pete Best in August 1962. The group's first single, 'Love Me Do', was released in the UK in October 1962 and entered the UK singles chart, while their first album, 'Please Please Me', followed in March 1963 and went to number one in the UK albums chart. Many other hit singles and albums followed and their success in the UK and in other countries was unprecedented. For example, in the USA their first single to be released, 'I Want to Hold Your Hand', sold a million copies and reached number one in the Billboard singles chart in January 1963.

The top five places in the Billboard singles charts for 4th April, 1964, were held by songs recorded by the Beatles. From number one downwards these were 'Can't Buy Me Love', 'Twist and Shout', 'She Loves You', 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' and 'Please Please Me'. In addition, seven other singles of theirs appeared in the top hundred in the Billboard chart and the next week two more singles also entered the top one hundred.

The Beatles continued to be very successful until they decided to disband the group from 1970 but all four group members continued to have their own careers as musicians. In 1988 the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) later decided that from 2001 onwards World Beatles Day should be celebrated on 16th January each year.