Plus Eleven Trivia Quiz

Answer: The number of cards in two suits of a standard deck.

Caesar met his fate on the ides of March - the 15th. Adding 11 gives 26. There are 13 cards in a suit in a standard deck, so there are 26 cards in two suits. Six squared is 36. The only prime number between 25 and 30 is 29, and 75% of the time February has 28 days.

Answer: Another name for the game of Blackjack.

There are 10 lords a-leaping in the famous Christmas carol "A Partridge in a Pear Tree". Adding 11 gives you 21, which is another name for the game of Blackjack. That game was known first as "Twenty-one". The name "Blackjack" originated in the US during World War One, when special payouts were given if a player's score of 21 was achieved with the Ace of Spades and a black jack.

Answer: A very unlucky one.

Two people, Jack and Jill, went up that hill. Adding 11 gives 13, reputedly a very unlucky number indeed. There are a number of accounts of the origin of thirteen's unfortunate reputation. One of the most frequently-cited has to do with the Last Supper, in which Jesus sat down with his twelve disciples, making thirteen people at the table. Jesus was then betrayed by one of those disciples, Judas Iscariot, leading to the superstition that if thirteen people sit down to dinner together, one will shortly die.

Answer: The number of trombones that led the big parade.

The traditional retirement age is 65 - adding 11 gives 76, which is the number of trombones that led the big parade in "The Music Man". It was a huge Broadway hit in 1957, the story of a con man who falls in love with a librarian.

Answer: The number of cornets close at hand.

You start with 99 bottles of beer, add 11, and get 110-the number of cornets close at hand in the song "Seventy-six Trombones" from "The Music Man". There were 101 Dalmatians in Disney's animated film. Question Mark and the Mysterians sang "96 Tears", which made it to #1 on the Billboard charts in October of 1966. Twelve squared is 144, also known as a gross.

Answer: The number of blackbirds baked in a pie.

A baker's dozen of anything is 13 - adding 11 gives 24 - "four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", from "Sing a Song of Sixpence". There are 30 days in September. Oxygen's atomic number is 8.

Including 13 item's in a "baker's dozen" originated in the 13th century in England. Bakers were known for selling skimpy goods-so, even though you got a dozen loaves in an order, each loaf was small and unsatisfactory. King Henry III enacted a law requiring loaves to weigh a minimum number of ounces. Bakers then were afraid of coming up short, so they threw in an extra loaf to ensure they met the weight requirements-hence, a "baker's dozen".

Answer: The number of chromosome pairs in a human cell.

There are twelve days from Christmas to Epiphany (the twelve days of Christmas). Adding 11 gives 23 - the number of chromosome pairs in a human cell. Five squared is of course 25, and 21 is the traditional age of majority in the US (18 is also sometimes given as the age of majority).

Answer: The emergency number for the US phone system.

Squaring 30 gives you 900. Adding 11 gives 911, which is the emergency response number in the USA. The number of the beast is 666, Tony Hawk landed a 900 (2 1/2 airborne rotations on a skateboard). There are various relay distances in the Olympics but none relates to 911.

Answer: Jack Benny's eternal age.

There are 28 grams in an ounce (to the nearest whole number); adding 11 gives 39. Jack Benny famously (and voluntarily) stopped aging at the ripe (youngish) age of 39. There are 40 winks in a short nap, 36 inches in a yard, and the 38th parallel formed the border between North and South Korea prior to the Korean War.

Answer: Part of a "Catch"-y title by Joseph Heller.

There are 11 players per team on the field in the games mentioned. Adding 11 to that figure gives 22. Joseph Heller is the author of Catch-22, a famed classic satirical novel about the military during the Second World War. The "catches" were paradoxical glitches in the military rules that rendered effective and logical actions impossible. Catch-22 went like this: Men flying bombing missions sometimes felt so keenly that they were wrong that they tried to get out of flying any more missions by claiming mental unfitness for duty.

However, by definition (the military's definition),, the desire not to fly missions proved a person's sanity, so anyone who tried to avoid flying by reason of mental unfitness was necessarily deemed sane and had to continue flying.

The phrase has become part of our daily language, describing all kinds of absurd double-bind situations.