24 Carat Trivia Quiz

Answer: Using the amount of gold (by MASS) in the piece

Gold is a soft and malleable metal, so it is often alloyed with other metals just to make the piece sturdier -- but, of course, that also usually means that the piece is cheaper to make! To calculate the purity of a gold alloy in carats, you take the total mass of gold in the piece, divide it by the total mass of the piece, and then multiply the whole thing by 24. Something that's 100% gold is thus 24 carats, something that's 75% gold is 18 carats, and so on.

Something that's say, 50% gold by mass may not be 50% gold by volume; it all depends on the characteristics of the other metal in the alloy.

You'll often see "carat" abbreviated "k", since "karat" is another accepted spelling of the word.

Answer: Timothy Dalton

Sean Connery faced off against Auric Goldfinger in "Goldfinger", unmasking his wicked plan to foment world chaos (and personal profit) by attacking the United States' gold reserves. By the time that Francisco Scaramanga -- armed with a "Golden Gun" -- devised a fiendish plot to misuse solar energy in the pursuit of power ten years later, it was Roger Moore who had to stop him. Twenty-one years after that, Pierce Brosnan halted a devious scheme to misuse the space-based weapons of the "GoldenEye" satellite.

Timothy Dalton played Agent 007 in two movies in the late 1980s, "The Living Daylights" and "Licence to Kill."

Answer: Southeast Asia

The Golden Triangle spans nearly a million square kilometers (more than 350,000 square miles) of mountains in Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand. The rough terrain makes the region difficult to police, and the opium business brings in enough money that the industry can be assured of defenders. (In fact, etymologically, it's this cash flow that makes the region "Golden.")

In the early 2000s, a large swath of Afghanistan -- the "Golden Crescent" -- came to rival the Golden Triangle as an opium producer.

Answer: The golden ratio

The golden ratio, commonly represented by the Greek letter phi, is equal to one half times the quantity one plus the square root of five. It can be derived from a relatively simple expression: for two positive numbers a and b, the golden ratio is equal to the ratio a/b AND to the ratio (a+b)/a. Obviously, this doesn't work for any arbitrary numbers a and b, but that just creates an opportunity.

Many artists and architects -- such as Salvador Dalí and Le Corbusier -- have taken special steps to incorporate the golden ratio into their work, pursuing mathematical means to achieve the perfect aesthetic.

Answer: Rumplestiltskin

The backstory of "Once Upon a Time," which began airing on ABC in 2011 in the US, is complex, but boils down to this: with the aid of Rumplestiltskin, Snow White's evil stepmother cursed a fairytale land so that her enemy would never get her "happily ever after" ending. Now all the familiar fairytale characters are trapped in a modern town in Maine, with no memory of their former lives except for a vague sense of something missing. Mr. Gold knows the truth, though, and Robert Carlyle plays him with a quiet and intriguing menace even as flashbacks to Rumplestiltskin show a devilish, barely restrained glee.

Answer: Both said that it occurred in the distant past.

Hesiod, who lived around the same time as Homer in the 600s or 700s BC, wrote in his "Works and Days" that there were five ages of man. In the beginning, before Zeus ruled the gods and before Prometheus stole fire, "a golden race of mortal men ... dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands" (as translated by H. G. Evelyn-White). These Golden Age men were not literally golden, Plato later argued, but metaphorically so: they were noble and pure. Their descendants were less so, with humanity's condition and characteristics degenerating from the Silver Age to the Bronze Age. The Heroic Age -- the time of the Trojan War -- offered a brief hope for humanity, soon dashed by the Iron Age to which Hesiod himself belonged.

Ovid (43 BC - ca. 17 AD) used a very similar concept in his "Metamorphoses," but simplified the whole picture by taking out the Heroic Age entirely. After the Golden Age, "a silver race arose: not as fine as its golden predecessor, but better than the gleaming bronze to come" (as translated by David Drake).

Answer: While playing a massively multiplayer online game

A gold farmer is someone who plays a massively multiplayer online game (like "World of Warcraft", for example) to earn in-game cash or items that he or she can then sell for real-world money. "Gold" refers to in-game cash, which is often called gold when the game is set in a fantasy world.

The "farmer" part of the term is because in-game gold usually takes a great deal of time and tedious effort to accumulate -- through quests or through slaying computer-generated creatures time and again -- which is exactly why wealthier players are willing to pay real money for it.

There are quite a number of people, usually based in developing countries, who are gold farmers as a full-time job!

Answer: They orbit their stars at just the right distance: not too hot and not too cold for liquid water.

All stars except our own are tremendously far away for any traveler with known technology -- even Mars is far away! Meanwhile, we haven't encountered any alien civilizations, so it would be tough to figure out exactly which ones might be dangerous. (Science fiction writers have been working hard on that one, though.)

Extrasolar planets -- planets in other solar systems -- are tiny, tiny targets for telescopes, so details like the composition of a rocky crust cannot be made out from this distance. Astronomers can, however, determine a planet's orbital parameters, and from there they can calculate how much heating the planet should receive from its sun. The "Goldilocks zone" is a band wherein orbiting planets may well be habitable for life as we know it, although temperature isn't everything and there are no guarantees.

Answer: Atalanta

Among the young human women of Greek mythology, Atalanta stands out. First, she was something of a career woman. Abandoned as an infant by her royal father (he had wanted a boy), she grew into a formidable hunter, and participated in the voyage of the Argo and the Hunt of the Calydonian Boar on more or less equal footing with the men.

Second, when she was forced to consider marriage, Atalanta managed to attach her own terms. After she became famous, her father suddenly recalled their relationship, and insisted that, as a princess, she had to marry. Fine, said Atalanta, but she insisted in turn that she could never marry a man who wasn't her athletic match. By the time Melanion came along, Atalanta had a string of failed suitors. He realized that he couldn't win without help, so he turned to Aphrodite for help, and the goddess of love provided him with a strategy. Was it cheating? Absolutely! But I'll cut Melanion a little slack here, because according to the rules of the foot race, a losing suitor wasn't simply sent home alone -- he was executed!

Sadly, as a married couple, Atalanta and Melanion followed in the footsteps of all too many mythological husbands and wives: they were changed out of human form (in their case, into lions) after offending the wrong god. Sometimes you just can't catch a break.

Answer: Abbey Road

"Golden Slumbers" is quite short, just about a minute and a half in length. The lyrics are based on "Cradle Song" from the early 1600s, though the melody is original to the Beatles. The opening lines -- "Once there was a way to get back homeward / Once there was a way to get back home / Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry / And I will sing a lullaby" -- are sung gently and softly; the drums enter, and the vocals crescendo, on the "Golden slumbers" line that follows.

The "Abbey Road" medley, comprising nearly all the second side of the 1969 album, is a series of short songs, very different in terms of theme and musical motif, that nonetheless flow smoothly into one another. "Golden Slumbers" is introduced by "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window," and leads into "Carry That Weight."