Footloose Trivia Quiz

Answer: They each have one foot.

Long John Silver is the one-legged pirate in Treasure Island. Snails and other gastropod molluscs have a single "foot" which they protrude out of their shell for locomotion and/or attachment to a surface. (Some snails live in the sea, but not all. Their feet do not have toes.)

Answer: calcaneus

The metatarsals are the bones across the main part of the foot (between the ankle and the toes). A phalanx is one of the toe (or finger) bones. The tibia is in the lower leg - it is the shin bone. The ankle bones (of which calcaneus is one) are the tarsals.

Answer: a fungus

There are several different species of fungus that can cause athlete's foot, but the most common ones belong to the genus Trichophyton. The fungus grows on the surface of the skin, especially between the toes, causing damage by digesting and feeding on the living cells of the skin and underlying tissues. Yuk!

Answer: He has cerebral palsy.

"My Left Foot" was released in 1989, and is based on a true story. The movie stars Daniel Day-Lewis as the Irishman Christy Brown. Christy Brown was born with cerebral palsy, and could at first only move his left foot. As a child he was considered by doctors to be mentally disabled as well, but he overcame his problems to write the autobiography on which this movie is based.

Answer: Labour

Michael Foot was leader of the British Labour Party from 1980 to 1983, but he never became Prime Minister - he resigned after his party lost the 1983 election. The other two main British political parties are the Conservatives and the Liberals. There really is a British political party called the Official Monster Raving Loonies, which has been going since 1983 (they fielded 19 parliamentary candidates in the 2005 general election) - but the party has never won a parliamentary seat.

Answer: A human foot is nearly always shorter than 12 inches.

Although the "foot" probably has its historical origins in the length of a human foot, the average length of the human foot (for both women and men) is in fact well below 12 inches. Perhaps this is because the original measurement was of a human foot with a shoe on.

Answer: trochee

A "foot" is one of the units of rhythm in a line of verse - for example, an iambic pentameter (as in much of Shakespeare's verse) has five iambs. An iamb has two syllables, which are short-long (or, unstressed-stressed), as in e.g. "Macbeth". A spondee is long-long, and a pyrrhus is short-short.

Answer: fourteen

Insects have six legs (and spiders have eight), but a woodlouse is a crustacean: as such, it is more closely related to prawns and shrimps than to beetles etc. Insects, Arachnids (including spiders and scorpions), Myriapods (millipedes and centipedes) and Crustaceans are the four main classes of the animal phylum Arthropoda. Most crustaceans are aquatic, but the woodlouse is a rare terrestrial example.

Answer: Eric Idle

"One Foot in the Grave" was a popular sitcom on British TV from 1990 to 2000, with many repeats since. It features the tribulations of the grumpy retired security guard, Victor Meldrew (played by Richard Wilson), whose response to most of life's troubles is his catchphrase - "I don't believe it!"

Answer: all of these

In Association Football ("soccer"), players (except the goalkeeper) are not allowed to touch the ball with their hands - but in the three types of "foot" ball here, the use of the hands is allowed (as it is also in American football, of course). In Australian Rules, players can only run with the ball if they bounce it on the ground at intervals, and they cannot pass by throwing (it must be punched across). Gaelic football (played in Ireland) also forbids throwing of the ball but allows punching. In Rugby football ("rugger"), the ball can be thrown to team-mates, but only backwards.

In all forms of football, kicking the ball with the foot is permitted!