Treasure Hunter Trivia Quiz

Answer: Saint Lawrence River

Despite the name, there's actually nearly two thousand islands that form this archipelago in the Saint Lawrence River. The river straddles the border between the United States and Canada, flowing northeast from Lake Ontario to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.

In order to be classified as one of the Thousand Islands, the landmass needs to satisfy a number of conditions, namely having at least two trees on it (living, mind you) and having at least 1 square foot of land above the water level for the entire year.

The largest of these islands, Wolfe Island, is part of Canada and comes in at around 120 square kilometres in area.

Answer: Reuben

As often is the case, there are several supposed inventors of the Reuben sandwich, one being Arnold Reuben of Reuben's Delicatessen in New York City (the restaurant closed in 2001). There are several variations on the sandwich including the Walleye Reuben, which uses walleye fish, and the Lobster Reuben, which uses lobster.

Some variations also call for using French dressing instead of Russian or Thousand Island dressing.

Answer: The "M" in MB (megabytes)

In computing, one thousand bytes is referred to as a kilobyte (KB) - a megabyte (MB) is one million bytes, or one thousand kilobytes. In fact, anything with a "kilo-" prefix will represent one thousand of something (eg, kilograms, kilometres, kilojoules). If you're dealing with Roman numerals, though, you'll find one thousand represented by M. Binary numbers can be easily converted into decimal by imagining each digit as a successive power of two, from right to left, starting with 2^0 and adding all the powers for which there is a 1 (ie, in this case, 2^9 + 2^8 + 2^7 + 2^6 + 2^5 + 2^3).

Answer: Vanessa Carlton

Who could forget the music video, wherein Vanessa casually played the piano as it magically rolled itself around town? Not even Vanessa could have predicted just how popular "A Thousand Miles", her debut single, was going to be, reaching number 1 on the US Billboard Top 40, Billboard Adult Contemporary and ARIA charts, and even being covered by Terry Crews of all people in the film "White Chicks".

Answer: Helen (of Troy)

"The face that launched a thousand ships" is a phrase that we've often heard around the place, but its origin actually stems from Christopher Marlowe's sixteenth century work "The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus". Helen's abduction by Paris, the Trojan prince, is said to be the reason why one thousand ships were launched to rescue her, thus the immortal line, "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships ... ?"

Answer: SEGA

Sega's SG-1000 was first released in 1983 in Japan, though its release was perhaps poorly timed - Nintendo also launched their Famicom (the precursor to the NES) on the exact same day. Nevertheless, Sega persevered and released a follow-up console the next year, the SG-1000 II, though it too didn't fare very well.

It wasn't until they released the Sega Master System in 1985 that things started to look up for the Japanese firm.

Answer: Barium

Alkaline earth metals are group 2 elements on the periodic table and tend to be fairly reactive at normal temperatures and pressures. Typically, barium won't be found on its own in nature - oftentimes it'll be as part of a mineral. When used in fireworks, imparts a greenish hue to proceedings (though it's usually as a compound rather than just pure barium).

It's also the groan-worthy punchline to the age-old pun about what to do with a dead chemist (barium - bury 'em).

Answer: Anne Boleyn

The 1969 film was based on a 1948 play by Maxwell Anderson and starred Richard Burton as Henry VIII and Genevieve Bujold as his second wife, Anne Boleyn. The film tells Anne's story as a woman who initially spurned Henry's advances and then consented once he suggested divorcing Katherine of Aragon. Anne was portrayed as very controlling in the film, and several scenes such as Anne ordering the death of Thomas More and Henry visiting Anne on the night before her execution are considered fictional.

The film received mix reviews but ended up with ten Academy Award nominations, winning for best costumes.

Answer: Paper Mario

After the success of "Paper Mario" on the Nintendo 64 in 2000/2001, a follow-up hit the shelves in 2004 for the Nintendo GameCube entitled "Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door". The second in the series (and the third "Mario" RPG overall), "The Thousand-Year Door" strayed away from the usual Mushroom Kingdom setting and even the usual "Bowser is the bad guy" plot, opting for an original menace in the form of the X-Nauts, who are trying to gain control of seven crystal stars and resurrecting the Shadow Queen. Critical reception was favourable (as you'd expect for a "Mario" game).

Answer: Baseball

To bat a thousand means to reach base with every at bat in baseball. So if someone is batting a thousand, he/she is doing something perfectly. However, the phrase is often used sarcastically when nothing is going right. Unfortunately, I'm batting a thousand on this treasure hunt!