Somewhere Under the Rainbow Trivia Quiz

Answer: Red

When consumers worried about the food coloring Allura Red AC, also called FD&C Red 40, some companies switched to the traditional natural coloring carmine or cochineal, made from crushing cochineal bugs. Stephen Crane wrote the classic Civil War novel "The Red Badge of Courage", published in 1895, and researched it by talking to veterans.

The red badge was a bloody bandage, showing that one had been wounded in action. British soldiers earned the nickname "redcoats" for their red uniforms.

Answer: Indigo

Isaac Newton added indigo to the five previous colors of the spectrum, though he may have been referring to a lighter blue. Duke Ellington and Barney Bigard wrote the tune and Irving Mills wrote the lyrics to the 1930 jazz song "Mood Indigo". The indigo bunting is a dark blue North American songbird, but indigo is perhaps most famous for being the dye that produces the pleasingly faded look of blue jeans. Rather than fading after exposure to light like most dyes, it fades from friction, making interesting patterns the longer an indigo-dyed garment is worn. Denim is dyed with synthetic indigo these days, but the color behaves similarly to the original plant-based dye.

Answer: Yellow

The Beatles sang about their "Yellow Submarine" in their 1966 album "Revolver", and two years later an animated movie with the same title, featuring their music, was released. The U.S. cavalry began with yellow as its branch color in 1855, despite yellow and "yellow-bellied" being slang for cowardly at the same time.

Answer: Ultraviolet

A band of near ultraviolet is part of a rainbow, just beyond the visible colors at the inside of the arc. Because raindrops don't work as perfectly as a prism, the band of near ultraviolet or ultraviolet may be weak in a rainbow, compared to the split colors of a prism. Ultraviolet radiation from the sun is necessary for humans and many other animals to produce Vitamin D, but too much is harmful. Johann Wilhelm Ritter discovered ultraviolet in 1801, when he found that invisible rays beyond violet darkened light-sensitive paper even more quickly than violet light.

Answer: Orange

Orange is one of the few English words without a natural rhyme. Orange County and its county seat Orange, in northern Virginia, are known for being the site of General Lee's headquarters during the Civil War, and being strategically important for many troop movements. Saffron robes, in shades of orange, are common among Buddhists and Hindus.

Answer: Violet

Both North America and Europe have native violets. The flower was the origin of the word "violet" to mean a pale shade of purple, but the phrase "shrinking violet" to mean a shy person didn't come in use until the 19th century. Elizabeth Taylor marketed a perfume called "Violet Eyes" in honor of her famous eye color, an unusually deep shade of blue that appears violet.

Answer: Cyan

Cyan, a light blueish-green, is one of the four colors used in color printing, along with magenta, yellow and black. This is abbreviated CMYK, with K standing for "key" to represent black, because black was the "key" used to align the other colors. Cyanosis usually shows up first as a bluish coloring in the lips or fingertips, and indicates low oxygen saturation. Cyanide was first created by heating the pigment Prussian Blue, and was named for the Greek work kyanos, dark blue.

Answer: Infrared

Near infrared exists in a rainbow beyond the red band, but raindrops don't split light perfectly, so the band is weaker than what can be produced by a prism. Night vision goggles work by amplifying ambient light, including infrared light, and converting it all to visible light.

Thermal imaging shows the extra heat from infrared emitted or reflected by objects, and is a way of tracking warmer things such as humans or animals even in the dark, and it also has many medical and scientific uses.

Answer: Blue

Dark blue coats and light blue trousers were the uniform of U.S. soldiers during the mid-19th century, earning them the nickname "blue bellies" by their gray-clad Confederate opponents during the Civil War. "The blues" has been a slang term for sadness in the U.S. since the 19th century.

The blues as a musical genre rose out of a fusion of musical traditions in the U.S. south at the turn of the 20th century, focusing on African-American experiences and personal laments. Not an example of the blues at all, Irving Berlin's song "Blue Skies", about being in a joyous mood, soared to popularity in the late 1920s.

It also used bluebirds to symbolize happiness, like the bluebirds that would fly over "The White Cliffs of Dover" in the 1941 song by Walter Kent and Nat Burton, another song looking forward to the happier days of peace rather than an example of the blues.

Answer: Green

Green has long been associated with jealousy, but in the late 20th century, the Green Party, Greenpeace, and other organizations used it as a symbol of environmentalism and now that meaning has caught on. Green has been associated with money in the U.S. after the first paper "greenbacks," literally printed with a green back, were issued in the 1860s. Traffic lights use green as a color to mean go, a tradition that goes back to the first ones and even before, when colors were used for railroad signals.