Squirrelled Away Trivia Quiz

Answer: Oak

A literal case of squirrelling away, it's known that squirrels very purposely store nuts away for the winter, at a time when food is more scarce for them to locate. Acorns, the nuts of the oak tree, fall during the autumn and are a particularly nutritious food for animals of all sorts.

When they're buried, though, they are effectively seeds for oaks. A properly-tended acorn will grow into a mighty oak tree if left in a spot with nutrient-rich soil, proper sunlight, and enough water to sustain. If an oak tree is solitary, it will produce more acorns with the intent to spread more of itself around.

Answer: Svalbard

How far north is Svalbard? Well, it's one of the furthest-north inhabited locations you can visit on the globe, a three hour flight north from Oslo, Norway. Its importance, in the context of this question, is in regards to a massive underground structure known as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built with the intent to house seeds from all around the world, ensuring backups of critical plants, crops, and biodiverse organisms in the case of natural or manmade disasters.

By the year 2020, the vault contained more than one million seed samples originating from all corners of the globe.

Answer: A wheel of cheese

A member of English Parliament and a figure in the Royal Navy, Pepys lived in London during the year of the Great Fire (and the preceding years, during the Great Plague). In one of the more interesting moments of his life, to protect his belongings from the fire that blazed in the capital for five days, he buried them in his yard. Because of the inherent value of Parmesan cheese and wine at this time in history, those were considered amongst the more important, valuable assets, so they were hidden away.

His house remained untouched by the fire, fortunately, and he would live another two decades.

Answer: Kimchi

Although these days, kimchi is part of a long list of easy-to-make fermented foods that anyone can, realistically, make from home, traditionally kimchi is a Korean dish made through very specific means. Cabbage is seasoned and then placed into an onggi, an earthenware pot, for temperature control at any time of the year.

This pot could be buried or it could be left on a special terrace for safekeeping. The result is a salty, spicy, briny treat, and a staple in many meals in this part of Asia. Naturally, like all good staple items, it also has a great deal of international popularity.

Answer: Rainy

While it is an idiom, it does have some sense; the idea behind 'saving your money for a rainy day' is simply one that insists that you stow away something for when it would be of better use. A 'rainy day fund' is one you take money from when you need to use it for something special, so generally it's a savings account or, in some cases, a contingency fund.

Answer: In her hair

Appearing in "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" and airing during the Christmas season in 1989, this event in Simpsons history was critical as it kicked off the primetime TV show that would become the longest-running animated comedy of all time. In the episode, Bart gets a tattoo and Marge needs to spend all of her savings, stowed in a big glass jar in her hair, to have it removed.

Unfortunately, Homer's Christmas bonus can't really cover any gifts; it's how they get Santa's Little Helper in the end.

Answer: Treasure Island

Most pirates simply didn't do this, to be fair. Though tales of pirates cite Scottish privateer William Kidd as an actual pirate of the era who engaged in the practice of burying his extensive loot, it's something that was made famous by books. "Treasure Island" is one such notable example as, in this literary classic, Long John Silver went searching for the buried treasure of Captain Flint who, per an old treasure map, buried his loot under the giant X.

Answer: Canada

Most of the world's real maple syrup is tapped from sugar maples in Canada (nine in ten bottles of syrup come from this nation), and because Quebec is the home to the majority of these maple trees, it makes sense that it would also be the home of the world's largest maple syrup reserve, designed as a way to manage the syrup market and ensure that international syrup costs remain stable in years of shortage. One such Quebec stockpile contains up to more than fifty million pounds of maple syrup in any given year.

Answer: Arrested Development

In only a couple episodes, mere weeks after George Bluth Sr. (played by Jeffrey Tambor) was sent to prison for a bit of 'light treason', his son, Michael Bluth (played by Jason Bateman) sought to solve his family's spending problem and ended up missing out on his father's cryptic suggestions that "there's always money in the banana stand"-- his way of insisting that the walls of the family's banana stand on Oceanside Wharf were lined with stacks of hidden bills. By that point, however, it didn't matter; Michael and his son, George Michael, burnt it down.

They rebuilt it by next episode, but the money was all gone, of course.

Answer: The Frozen Ark

Technically, you could squirrel away a squirrel here! The Frozen Ark Project was created in the 2000s with the intent to protect animals, especially threatened animals, by storing tissues and cells for study and aiming to avoid extinction. In light of the ongoing decline of biodiversity on the planet, institutions like the Frozen Ark have taken it upon themselves to act as the planet's natural insurance. Though they weren't the first to create 'frozen zoos', they did aid in growing an international collective of zoos kept under liquid nitrogen (called the Frozen Ark Consortium).