A Golden Tour Trivia Quiz

Answer: London

Golden Square sits close to Carnaby Street, just south of Oxford Street in London's West End. The land on which it was built was formerly known as Geldings Close, a named that it is presumed came from its use as land for pasture. The name Golden Square comes from a corruption (or refinement) of the word "gelding".

In 1670, Sir Christopher Wren complained to King Charles II that a number of unlicensed buildings were being erected in the fields surrounding Soho, including Golden Square, and so a ban on building was enforced. The owners petitioned Wren to allow the building of "such houses as might accommodate Gentry" there and Wren only granted this permission, in 1673, on the proviso that the builders improved the area's sewers and built houses to accord with the plans that he attached to the official permission (whether those plans were drafted by Wren is open to debate).

The building of the square began in the early 1680s and took around twenty years to complete. Within forty years it had become the home of several foreign ambassadors.

Answer: Iceland

The Golden Circle is the most popular of Iceland's many tourist destinations, with all the sites viewable in a leisurely day-trip from the capital, Reykjavik. Chief amongst its attractions is the site of the Great Geysir at Haukadalur, the erupting hot spring that gives its name to geysers around the world.

The huge spurts that make geysers so attractive to visitors are caused by the meeting of cold water and hot, usually volcanic, rocks. The almost instantaneous boiling or superheating of the water causes steam and hot water to race to the surface of the water where it breaks the surface tension and shoots spectacularly into the air.

The Great Geysir at Haukadalur fell dormant in the early twentieth century due to the build up of silicon dioxide deposits, although it could be manually set off by the addition of soap powder to the water, an action that was occasionally undertaken for special visiting dignitaries. Seismic activity in the early part of the 21st century has seen the Great Geysir become active again.

Answer: Rome

The Domus Aurea was built by the Emperor Nero after the Great Fire of Rome of 64 A.D. True to Nero's style it was an extravagant edifice, bedecked with jewels, gold leaf, ivory and marble and containing a specially commissioned 35 metre bronze statue of the emperor himself.

After Nero's death in 68 A.D., his successors were unsure of what to do with the building. The decision was taken to strip the villa of all its riches and then to fill it with earth. As soon as ten years after Nero's death, the site was being re-used for new buildings including an amphitheatre and some public baths. The Domus Aurea was quickly forgotten and was not re-discovered until the 15th century when a Roman citizen accidentally found it after falling through some fractured ground.

The villa can be found under the remains of the Baths of Trajan but is rarely open to public view due to issues with the stability of the structure.

Answer: Ghana

Ghana's stunning tropical beaches lie only a few degrees north of the equator, so the climate is very warm indeed.

Ghana takes its name from the old West African empire, which did not include the land of the modern day country. The empire covered a large area that is mainly in modern day Senegal and Mali.

The land of modern day Ghana was found to have significant deposits of gold and so the Europeans came in numbers from the fifteenth century onwards. The Portuguese were the first to establish a trading colony, soon to be joined by the Dutch, the Swedish, the Danish and the English. It was the British who coined the name "Gold Coast" to reflect the abundance of that commodity in the area.

Answer: Altai Mountains

The name of the Altai Mountains comes from the Turkic words "Al", meaning gold, and "Tau", meaning mount. An area of the mountains was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998 for its plentiful and diverse flora that are important for the understanding of evolution of vegetation in northern Asia, for the role it plays in conserving the snow leopard and for its outstanding geological features.

Because of the large number of undisturbed glaciers in the region, the Altai mountains are considered important for the monitoring of global warming.

Answer: Kolkata

The Golden Triangle is a tourist trail that organised tours normally complete in around a week. It takes in the cities of Delhi, Jaipur and Agra. Amongst the myriad of sights that a visitor will encounter on this tour are the Amber Fort in Jaipur, the Akshardham Temple in Delhi and the most visited attraction in India, the Taj Mahal at Agra that, in 2007, was voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World.

Kolkata, formerly known as Calcutta, is in the north-eastern state of West Bengal and was the capital of India during the majority of the years of the British Raj.

Answer: Opium

The area of the Golden Triangle covers approximately 350,000 square kilometres of mainly mountainous land and the practice of poppy-growing there is thought to have come from migrants from China in the late nineteenth century. By the 21st century, the Burmese part of the triangle was responsible for the vast majority of the exports from the region.

The Golden Crescent of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan has a longer history of poppy-growing with the trade exploiting the Silk Road trade routes. But it was with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 that the Crescent began to dominate the world market as production levels rocketed due to other means of income being difficult to come by. With the exception of a brief period under Taliban rule, Afghanistan has maintained its place at or near the top of the opium export market ever since.

Answer: Queensland

The Gold Coast is Queensland's most popular tourist destination (and not just because of the meter maids). The beaches attract many, as do the theme parks but one of the newest attractions is the 322 metre high Q1 building, the largest residential building in the world at the time of its completion.

Its 77th floor viewing deck provides magnificent views of the Queensland coast, Brisbane and the Pacific Ocean.

Answer: Goldeneye

Goldeneye was the estate of British novelist and former Naval intelligence officer, Ian Fleming. Fleming's most famous creation was the British spy James Bond and many of the Bond novels were penned on the estate. The name of estate has no clear history; Fleming claimed that it was named for either the Carson McCullers novel "Reflections in a Golden Eye" or an intelligence operation that he had devised in World War II. Alternatively, its name could come from the fact that it gave a view of Golden Head Bay.

In 1995, the film "Goldeneye" was released; the first official Bond movie not to be based on a work by Fleming.

Answer: San Francisco

The bridge is, of course, the Golden Gate bridge. The Golden Gate that it spans is a strait of water that connects San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean and bisects the land between the peninsulas of San Francisco and Marin County.

The strait was named, in 1846, by John C. Fremont as "Chrysopylae" or "Golden Gate" as it reminded him of Chrysoceras, or the Golden Horn, in Istanbul. Fremont was an Army captain and explorer who led many of the expeditions to the west of the continent in the middle of the nineteenth century when the concept of "manifest destiny" was at the forefront of American politics.