Guilding the Stone - June Trivia Quiz

Answer: calcium carbonate

Between the shell and the body mass of an oyster is a layer of tissue known as the mantle. If a grain of sand, parasite or other irritant gets inside the shell, the mantle secretes nacre (also known as mother-of-pearl), a chalky substance which eventually hardens into a pearl. Pearls also contain conchiolin (a protein) and a small quantity of water.

Answer: Pearl White

Pearl White appeared in more than 200 silent films, usually serials, between 1910 and 1924. "The Perils of Pauline" is one of the few that is still remembered: Ms White plays an heiress whose guardian is continually plotting to kill her in various bizarre ways in order to get his hands on her fortune. Milton Berle is said to have made his first uncredited screen appearance in the series at the age of six.

Answer: Husband E. Kimmel

The Pacific Fleet's headquarters moved from San Diego to Pearl Harbor early in 1941, and Kimmel was appointed Commander-in-Chief. Following the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941, he and Lieutenant-General Walter Short were relieved of their commands and found guilty of dereliction of duty. The true extent of Admiral Kimmel's responsibility for the disaster has always been a matter of debate, but attempts to rehabilitate him officially have had little success.

Answer: London

Wearing clothes covered in small mother-of-pearl buttons, the Pearlies have been part of East End life since the nineteenth century. Their origins are vague. The earliest Pearlies are generally thought to have been chosen by the costermongers to protect their interests, and there are several differing explanations of the origin of the costume. Today they are concerned mainly in charitable work.

Answer: Jackson, Mississippi

The Pearl River is formed where the Nanawaya and Tallahaga creeks come together in Winston County. MS. Its lower reaches form the boundary between Mississippi and Louisiana. Jackson, the state capital of Mississippi, is the largest city through which it flows.

Answer: China

Mrs Buck, the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary, was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia in 1892. Her family was sent to China when she was only a few months old. Apart from her college studies in the USA, she spent most of her first forty years in China, marrying a fellow missionary.

After a divorce in the mid-1930s she remarried and spent the remainder of her life in the US. The most famous of her Chinese novels is "The Good Earth", to which she owed her Nobel Prize.

Answer: Cleopatra VII of Egypt

According to Pliny the Elder, Cleopatra made a bet with Mark Antony that she could consume ten million sesterces' worth of food at a single banquet. She won the bet by dissolving a pearl (said to be the largest in the world at the time) in vinegar and drinking the solution.

The calcium carbonate of the pearl would presumably help to counteract the acidity of the vinegar. Stories of similar extravagance are told of other ancient rulers, e.g. Caligula.

Answer: Matthew

In the thirteenth chapter of Matthew's Gospel, the parable of the pearl is one of several that follow the parable of the sower. "Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it."

Answer: Georges Bizet

Originally produced in 1863, Bizet's opera was admired by critics like Berlioz, but fell from favour and suffered from various clumsy revisions by other hands. In recent years, with the restored original score and libretto, it has returned to the repertoire of some of the leading houses.

The duet has often been recorded separately, most notably by Jussi Björling and Robert Merrill in 1950.

Answer: Margaret

"Margarita" is the usual Latin word for pearl. A large pearl of the kind produced by mussels was called "unio", which ultimately gives us the word onion"! The word "pearl" itself probably also has its origins in Latin, but the derivation is uncertain.