How Good is your General Ignorance? Quiz

Answer: Tortoise

Timothy the tortoise was found on a Portuguese pirate ship by Captain Everard of the Royal Navy. After serving as a ship's mascot on HMS Queen at the first battle of Sevastopol in 1854, Timothy went on to fill this role on other ships.

After retiring in 1892 it lived at Powderham Castle, home of the Earls of Devon. In 1926 the tortoise was found to be a female, although its name was not changed. It is one of the few tortoises to have its own biography, "Timothy the Tortoise: The Remarkable Story of the Nation's Oldest Pet", which was written by Rory Knight-Bruce and published in 2004.

Answer: Heron

Heron (or Hero) was an Egyptian who invented a working steam engine in the first century AD. Named an aeolipile or 'wind-ball', it rotated at some 1,500 revolutions per minute but no practical application could be found for the power this generated.

It was only in 1698 that Thomas Savery developed a practical steam-powered water pump. Soon after this in 1705 Thomas Newcomen patented what became a successful steam engine, used mainly for pumping water out of mines.

After improving Newcomen's engine, James Watt then patented his own steam engine in 1769, which was capable of driving factory machinery and was operational by the 1770s. Following this, Richard Trevithick developed a much more powerful engine, which used high-pressure steam and was able to provide power for moving vehicles. It was patented in 1802, when it was initially used to power a steam road locomotive then one running on tram rails at an ironworks in Wales.

Answer: Bootlace worm

As its name suggests, the bootlace or ribbon worm (Lineus longissimus) is very thin at only a few millimetres in diameter but also very long. The longest recorded specimen found so far measured 180 feet/55 metres long. It does not have a heart but uses its muscles to pump the blood around its body.

Most species of the worm live on the ocean floor where they catch small crustaceans and invertebrates by 'lassoing' them with a proboscis, which is either sticky or covered with poisonous barbs. The worm can reproduce either by laying eggs and then fertilising them itself or by separating into small pieces, each of which then develops into a separate worm.

With very long tentacles, the lion's mane jellyfish has been found to measure up to 120 feet/36.5 metres long. Its bell (body) can be over 7 feet/2 metres in diameter.

As opposed to the longest, the overall largest known living animal is the blue whale. It can measure up to 110 feet/33 metres in length and the heaviest blue whale weighed by the National Marine Mammal Laboratory was 195 short tons/177 metric tons in weight. The whale's tongue alone can weigh 3 short tons/2.7 metric tons.

The giant squid is the second largest mollusc and living invertebrate and the largest recorded specimen was found to be 43 feet/13 metres long. The only known larger mollusc is the colossal squid, measured at up to 46 feet/14 metres long, although only a few specimens of these comparatively rare squid have been studied.

Answer: Gunpowder

Astronauts visiting the Moon's surface could not avoid bringing moondust back into their capsules as it persisted in clinging to their suits. They consistently reported that it smelled like used gunpowder, that it tasted bland and that it felt as soft as snow.

Meteors hitting the Moon's surface pound its rocks into this dust, which is mainly composed of silicon dioxide but also has small amounts of minerals and about 0.2 per cent sulphur. In contrast, black gunpowder's chemical composition is quite different as it contains about 75 per cent potassium nitrate/saltpetre, 15 per cent charcoal and 10 per cent sulphur.

According to the NASA website, it is believed that the smell is caused by the process of oxidation when the dust first comes into contact with oxygen. After a few days the dust ceases to smell, probably because the oxidation process is complete.

Answer: Herbert Spencer

The polymath Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) worked as a railway engineer for several years before becoming an editor of the "Economist" journal. He then became a full-time writer, publishing books and articles on psychology, sociology, biology and especially philosophy, as well as on other subjects.

The phrase "the survival of the fittest" is usually associated with Charles Darwin but was first used by Spencer in his book 'Principles of Biology', published in 1864. It was inspired by Darwin's theory of natural selection as propounded in his book "On The Origin Of Species", first published in 1859. In turn Darwin acknowledged Spencer's phrase as an accurate description of the theory in the fifth edition of this book, published in 1869.

Spencer's own theory of evolution was different from Darwin's. Whereas the latter's theory proposed an ongoing adaptation to changing circumstances, Spencer proposed that all forms in nature progress from the simple to the complex and envisioned an endpoint. For humans this endpoint was their perfect adaptation to living in society. Spencer also applied evolutionary theory to the fields of philosophy, psychology and sociology.

Although his popularity later waned somewhat, Spencer was considered to be the most famous contemporary philosopher by the 1870s. In 1902 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature and by the time he died over a million copies of his books had been sold.

Answer: Fat

When full, a camel's hump can be up to 30 inches/76 centimetres tall and has been found to weigh up to 80 pounds/36 kilogrammes. It can survive for up to two weeks without feeding by absorbing the reserves of fat stored there as adipose tissue.

A thirsty camel can drink 50 gallons/225 litres or more of water at a time and it is believed that the water is stored throughout the camel's body. It can live for days in hot conditions without drinking as its body has evolved ways to minimise the loss of this stored water. For example, its nostrils trap, condense and return into its body much of the water vapour in its expelled breath.

Also, unlike a human, a camel can tolerate quite a large increase in its body temperature before it sweats and so loses water. It only does this when its temperature reaches about 105 degrees Fahrenheit/41 degrees Centigrade so may not sweat at all in comparatively mild conditions.

Answer: Blue

Particles of organic or inorganic matter suspended in bodies of water such as rivers, lakes or oceans reflect the light reaching them, so affecting the apparent colour of the water containing them. For instance, the presence of particles of plants or that of green algae can make water appear green while the famous Yellow River in China looks this colour because it contains large amounts of mud particles from the Loess Plateau.

On a clear day, when the surface is still, the ocean and other large areas of water appear blue partly because their surface reflects the blue of the sky. However, the colour of something mainly depends on which parts of the whole spectrum of colours contained in natural light it emits, as opposed to absorbing. Water absorbs much more reddish light than it does blue light, which is distributed through the body of water and then emitted.

Purified water in a small container looks transparent but looking down into, or through, a larger volume of this water shows it to be a shade of light or turquoise blue. A much-cited example is that water in a swimming pool with white sides and bottom looks blue, even when in an indoor pool without natural light. Similarly, looking at a white light source or at white paper in natural sunlight through a long pipe with transparent ends containing water shows the water to be blue.

Answer: Amazonian tribespeople

Sixteenth century Europeans reported finding that people living along the Amazon river made waterproof shoes by spreading latex - the juice of the rubber tree - onto their feet and letting it dry.

By the late eighteenth century scientists had found that latex dissolved in turpentine formed a liquid that could be used for waterproofing cloth. However, it could start melting in hot weather and become stiff and brittle in cold weather so had limited practical use.

In 1839 Charles Goodyear from the US discovered that heating rubber and sulphur together produced a stronger, more stable and more elastic material. The process became known as vulcanisation after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, and from the early 1850s this vulcanised rubber was used to manufacture reliable waterproof products, including boots.

Although Goodyear himself died in poverty, the now multinational "Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company" was named after him when it was founded in 1898.

Answer: Ant

It has been found that the average human brain makes up just over two per cent of total body weight. Whilst this is a greater percentage than the just under one per cent comprised by a dolphin's brain, it is less than the three per cent made up by the mouse-like tree shrew's brain.

Although an ant's brain only weighs about 0.3 milligrams, it comprises some six per cent of its total body weight. It has been estimated that an ant's brain contains some quarter of a million individual brain cells, against about ten thousand million cells in an average human brain.

The "Guinness World Records 2009" book cites the most energetic animal brain as that of the African elephant-trunk fish (Gnathonomus petersi) which also makes up about three per cent of its total body weight. Its brain uses over fifty per cent of the oxygen the fish takes in whereas a human brain only uses some twenty per cent of the oxygen inhaled.

Answer: Dirt in the champagne glass

True champagne is made only from grapes grown in the Champagne region of northern France. These grapes are pressed very soon after being picked and the resulting juice is fermented in steel vats for some months. During this time the juice's natural sugar is converted into alcohol while a byproduct of the process, carbon dioxide, is allowed to escape.

Then wines from different vineyards are blended together and sugar and yeast are added before the wines are bottled and placed in cellars. A second fermentation then takes place and this time the carbon dioxide remains in the bottle, dissolved in the wine. After at least a year and a half's fermentation, the sediment is removed and the bottle is topped up with more of the same wine blend. Before the bottle is corked, sugar is often added to sweeten the alcohol, the amount added depending on the desired grade of sweetness, which ranges from 'doux' (sweet) to 'brut' (very dry).

If the champagne was poured into a clean, completely smooth, glass the carbon dioxide molecules present in champagne would simply evaporate as they need something to form into bubbles around. Natural imperfections in the champagne glass/flute have been thought to provide crannies where the carbon dioxide bubbles can form. However, more advanced microphotographic methods have been used recently by Gerard Liger-Belair, a professor of physical sciences, to show that natural imperfections in the glass are too small to allow this. Instead it is the microscopic dirt or dust particles on the glass that act as nuclei for the carbon dioxide molecules to condense into bubbles around.

The champagne manufacturers, Moet et Chandon, have estimated that the average bottle of champagne contains enough carbon dioxide to form 250 million bubbles. To put that another way, the contents of the average bottle of champagne can collect a lot of specks of dirt!