The Snows Are Coming Trivia Quiz

Answer: Hans Christian Andersen

"Frozen" is based on Andersen's story but it's fair to say that the final story bears minimal resemblance to it. When the film was first developed it was intended as a fairly straight adaptation. However, after a number of re-writes it evolved into the script that would spawn a million sing-a-longs.

Andersen wrote many fairy tales that are now recognised as literary classics globally, such as "Thumbelina", "The Little Mermaid" and "The Emperor's New Clothes". However, when he first published these stories, they were not instantly recognised as the influential classics that they would become. Andersen struggled to sell copies of his fairy tales until they were translated into English for a literary magazine several years after they were first published in Danish.

Answer: Sapporo

Sapporo is situated on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It is a relatively young city, having been founded in 1868. Its climate is perhaps warmer than one might expect with such heavy annual snowfall. Its mean annual temperature of 8.5 Celsius is similar to that of Edinburgh in Scotland, a city that gets just 46cm of snow a year on average. Sapporo's snowfall comes between November and April, a period in which more than two-thirds of days are snow days.

Answer: Cholera

I was one of those Snows who raised a pint of water in celebration of our illustrious namesake. The celebration was well-deserved for a man who changed the nature of public health in the UK and beyond. Prior to the 1854 cholera outbreak in Broad Street (as Broadwick Street was then known), the prevailing theory was that it was a disease caused by polluted air. As a committed epidemiologist, Snow did not accept this view and was determined to investigate the cause by examining the patterns of the outbreak. He discovered that most of the deaths occurred within a short distance of the water pump and that many of those who succumbed were known to regularly drink the water from it.

When he presented his evidence to the parish guardians, the decision was swiftly made to remove the handle of the pump. Incidences of the disease declined immediately afterwards, although Snow remarked that the epidemic was already in decline before this action was taken.

Answer: Red Hot Chili Peppers

The song set new records for the band. It was their first to hit the top 10 of the German singles chart and it became their 11th number one on the US Billboard Modern Rock chart, making the Red Hot Chili Peppers the most successful band in that chart's history.

Answer: Her heart

Thankfully the huntsman could not bring himself to undertake such a willful act of savagery. Instead of presenting Snow White's heart, he slaughtered a pig and took its heart instead. The subterfuge did not last for long as the huntsman's secret was betrayed by the Evil Queen's magic mirror, who declared that Snow White remained the fairest of them all.

Answer: China

Edgar Snow's book "Red Star Over China" was published in 1937. At the time of publication, China's Communist Red Army was not widely known outside of the country and its leader, Mao Zedong was not a household name even there. Snow interviewed Mao at length during his time encamped with the Red Army in 1936. Though the accuracy of some of the detail in the book has been questioned and portions can be seen as unwitting propaganda for Mao, it proved to be a hugely influential tome in terms of its shaping of Western views of the Chinese Communists.

With the fame that his first book brought him, Snow embarked on a career as a war correspondent in Asia and Russia during World War II. Following the end of the war, Snow returned to the US but over time became increasingly isolated in his home country as anti-Communist hysteria began to grip. He eventually moved abroad again at the end of the 1950s, never to return. He died in 1970, two years before Richard Nixon's visit to China began to thaw relations between the two countries.

Answer: Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

As well as being a terrific conspiracy thriller, Hoeg's hugely successful novel examines the relationship between Denmark and its former colony Greenland. Smilla is half-Danish, half-Greenlandic and her sense of disconnection with her country of residence leads her to form a relationship with the fatherless boy, who like her moved to Denmark's capital city after a young childhood spent in the open spaces of Greenland.

The book was adapted into a movie in 1997, "Smilla's Sense of Snow", starring Julia Ormond in the title role.

Answer: C.P. Snow

Snow came to the Nazi's attention through his position as the director of the Ministry of Labour in the wartime UK government. In later life, he was to become Minister of Technology in the first Wilson government (1964-66).

Prior to his civil service, Snow had been immersed in the academic world. He earned a doctorate in physics before becoming both a fellow and administrator of Cambridge University. During this time he also began a career in the literary world. As a novelist, Snow's best known works were the series of novels known as "Brothers and Sisters", including "The Masters", "The New Men" and "Corridors of Power". The novels all explored the workings of the academic and political worlds he had been a part of, and the place of the intellectual within them.

As a man whose formidable intellect embraced both the scientific and literary spheres, he was obsessed by the complete separation of these two areas in the world of education. He abhorred the snootiness of the literary elite, who looked down upon the "illiteracy" of the scientific world. In his famous lecture on "The Two Cultures", Snow admitted that scientists were often ignorant of great cultural works but, by comparison, literary intellectuals were mostly unable to answer a request to describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics, something that Snow described as "about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?"

Answer: The X-Files

The theme tune to "The X-Files" was released as a single and became a big hit in the UK, where it reached number two in the charts, and France, where it became only the second instrumental track ever to top the single charts.

The most notable feature of the track was an eerie whistle-like effect that formed the melody. Snow has stated that he was inspired by The Smiths' track "How Soon Is Now?" and came upon the effect by slamming the keyboard in frustration after having tried several different settings on his synthesizer without impressing the show's producer.

Answer: Mr. Men

The Mr. Men were born when Hargreaves was asked by his young son, Adam, what a tickle looked like. Hargreaves, who illustrated as well as wrote the series, drew Mr. Tickle and the rest soon became history. 13 books were published in 1971 and 1972, including Mr. Snow, before Hargreaves returned to add a further 26 to the series between 1976 and 1978. Following Roger Hargreaves' death in 1988, Adam took up the pencil, writing and illustrating more new characters.

A little known fact in keeping with the theme of this quiz: a number of the Mr. Men, and the subsequent Little Miss series of books, were edited by a Mrs. Snow.