A Bunch of Junk Trivia Quiz

Answer: a design of sailing ship

In Volume 39 of the original Hardy Boys Mystery Stories, the brothers purchase a Chinese junk named the Hai Hau to use as a ferry boat. Unbeknownst to them, the junk was originally stolen in Hong Kong. A junk is a type of Chinese sailing vessel. Junks tend to have very high sterns (poops), multiple masts with square-rigged sails, and a hull divided into compartments by bulkheads.

Answer: Oscar the Grouch

Oscar the Grouch was created by Jim Henson and was operated/voiced by Caroll Spinney until illness compelled him to hand off to Eric Jacobson. The original Oscar was orange but turned green thereafter. Oscar lives in a dustbin (garbage can) and sings "I Love Trash" from which the words in this question come.

His friend, Bruno the Trashman, moves his trash can around the set, as needed. In an interview, Oscar disclosed that his favorite dessert is spinach sardine chocolate fudge sundaes.

Answer: higher

New York Times financial reporter Alex Berenson, the author of "The Number" (2004), wrote "The credit quality of junk bonds varies widely." Berenson has a way with understatement. A junk bond is a debt, issued by a corporation, that carries a less than investment-grade credit rating.

These bonds have a higher risk of default and therefore must offer a higher yield than normal bonds to offset the risk. The companies issuing these bonds are often struggling financially and are therefore at higher risk of not paying their debts nor the interest on their debts. Junk bonds are euphemistically called "high-yield bonds" which makes them sound more attractive.

Answer: linking food and human history

Bittman, a former New York Times columnist and the author of "How to Cook Everything" and "VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00," wrote "Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal." His thesis is that human history parallels food history.

He sees a connection between food and war, economic inequality, the distribution of wealth, race relations, and public health. This is definitely not a cookbook.

Answer: junk yard, salvage

The American television programme was adapted from "Steptoe and Son," a similar show on BBC One (1962-1974). Norman Lear developed the idea for American audiences, which opened the way for other African-American television sitcoms. The business called Sanford and Son was well described by the sign which appeared in the opening credits.

It read "SANFORD and SON / 2d Hand / We Buy & Sell Junk / Antiques." Quincy Jones composed the music.

Answer: a place to store odds and ends

The 2015 TV episode was named for a fictional self-seminar called "Clean Out Your Junk Drawer." The character Gloria wins access to a seminar taught by the author, Debra Radcliffe. The idea is to allow couples to purge the emotional junk they are hanging on to.

The title is a play on the drawer commonly found in most homes into which miscellany is placed because there is no other place for it. Donna Smallin wrote, in "Organizing Plain and Simple" (2002), "There's nothing wrong with having a junk drawer. Where else can you store those odds and ends you need from time to time.

But some of what ends up in the junk drawer really is junk, such as unfixable items, pens that don't work, expired coupons, and a piece to a game you sold at a garage sale five years ago."

Answer: junk is slang for narcotics, especially heroin

The colloquial term "junk" began to be applied to narcotics, heroin in particular, in the 1910s. The terms junker and junkie were used epithetically from the 1920s to describe someone addicted to any narcotic drug but especially to heroin. In Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" (1957), he wrote "The poor fellow took so much junk into his system he could only weather the greater proportion of his day in that chair with the lamp burning at noon, but in the morning he was magnificent." And in 1982's "The Message", Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five said, "Rats in the front room, roaches in the back / Junkies in the alley with a baseball bat." These terms are not complimentary.

Answer: Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney wrote "Junk" in 1968 while meditating in India with the Maharishi Mehesh Yogi. It was recorded but used in neither the White Album nor Abbey Road. Once the Beatles broke up, McCartney used the song on his first solo album, "McCartney," in 1970.

It is essentially about the futility of materialism. The lyrics recite a collection of things -- motorcars and handlebars, parachutes and army boots, candlesticks and building bricks -- and concludes "'Buy, buy' / Says the sign in the shop window / 'Why, why?' / Says the junk in the yard." It is heard, oddly enough, on the soundtrack of the motion picture "Jerry Maguire" (1996).

Answer: erroneous conclusions based on flawed methods

The term junk science arose in the 1980s to describe apparently scientific conclusions based on spurious or fraudulent data, research methods of analysis. It is a pejorative term used by those who disagree strongly with the purported results or conclusions.

The label was popularized by Peter W. Huber in his book Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom" (1991). Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, in a 1997 US Supreme Court opinion, that junk science should be excluded for the same reasons that a phrenologist's expert opinion about a defendant should be inadmissible. Perhaps the worst effect of junk science is the concomitant erosion of public confidence in "good" science or "solid" science

Answer: Leroy Brown

Singer-songwriter Jim Croce wrote and recorded "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" in 1973. It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 list that summer; he died in September of that year. According to the lyrics, Leroy Brown was tall (6'4"), well dressed, bejeweled, drove nice cars (one Lincoln Continental, one Cadillac Eldorado), well-armed (a .32 calibre revolver and a straight razor), highly attractive to women and fear by most men.

Unfortunately, he made a pass at a woman named Doris to which her husband took exception and proceeded to do serious damage to Brown's body.