On This Day: IV Trivia Quiz

Answer: South Africa

The Cullinan was literally priceless when found, it far outweighed the previous record-holder, the 995.2-carat Excelsior, found in South Africa in 1893. The stone was then cut into a number of stones, and many of them ended up in the British crown jewels.

Answer: Apollo I

The fire was caused by a short circuit in the cabin. Plastics which were normally fire resistant ignited in the pure oxygen used by the astronauts. The tragedy was a serious setback for the Apollo programme which was gearing itself to put a man on the moon by 1970, fulfilling the dream of the late President Kennedy.

Answer: Challenger

The Challenger exploded in a ball of fire soon after blasting off for its tenth flight. The shuttle's fuel tanks, containing liquid hydrogen and oxygen, exploded 10 miles from the ground. It was NASA's second space tragedy (after the 1967 disaster) and was a major blow to its program.

The crew included Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher who had won her place on the flight in a nationwide competition. Challenger itself seemed reluctant to undertake its final mission, the launch was postponed five times and only went ahead after unseasonal ice was chipped from the shuttle.

Answer: Plymouth

Drake was born in Tavistock. A national hero to the English and a bloodthirsty pirate to the Spanish, he was buried at sea off the coast of Panama after suffering weeks of dysentary. The most famous English seaman of the Elizabethian age, Drake first put to sea in 1566. Eleven years later, when the Queen gave him command of five ships, he became the man after after Magellan to command an expedition to sail around the world. From his native Tavistock, near Plymouth, Drake went to defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588 and was acclaimed as England's hero. His final voyage to the West Indies, however, was unsuccessful.

Answer: Nathuram Godse

The great prophet of non-violence was still weak from a lengthy fast and from urging peace talks between Muslims and Hindus. Gandhi was walking through a New Delhi garden on his way to prayer when Godse stepped from the crowd and fired three shots into Gandhi's body.
Gandhi's last words were "Ram Ram" meaning "Oh God, Oh God". Godse made no attempt to flee and was saved from a lynching at the hands of the furious crowd by air force officers.

Answer: 1,700,000

The Red Army had held Stalingrad in the greatest and bloodiest land battle of the war. The German army was belived to have lost 850,000 troops and the Soviets almost as many in a seven month struggle that had destroyed most of the strategic city on the Volga.

The German commander, Von Paulus, who twice rejected Russian General Zhukov's surrender terms, and was promoted to Field Marshal by Hitler in a desperate attempt to stop him capitulating. But Hitler failed to live up to a promise to relieve the city with air drops and thousands of German soldiers starved to death in the bitter cold.

Answer: Queen Victoria

The cortege was hardly visible through the smoke of the guns, which kept booming out till the Alberta reached the harbour. The Queen had died at Osborne on the Isle of Wight on January 22nd, surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She was 82, and had lived and reigned longer than any other British monarch.
Queen Victoria was only 18 when she came to the throne and left her nation as one of the most powerful on earth.

Answer: Soviet Union

The final armoured column of Red Army forces went home after withdrawing from the capital, Kabul. The USSR had agreed two years before as part of the Geneva agreement they made to have their forces out by February 15th 1989. The last 120,000 troops made their way up the Salang Highway, watchful of ambushes by US backed mujahideen guerrillas.

The Russians had left large amounts of arms behind for the government forces. Afghan President Najibullah, who continued to rule under emergency powers, stated that a life or death struggle with the guerrillas would now begin.

Answer: Johann Gutenberg

Gutenberg had also transformed a wine press into a press capable of printing pages in his "Gothic" type. In 1450 he borrowed a large amount of money from Fust to develop his system of movable type cast in lead. Five years later Fust foreclosed on the mortgage and took possession of the type and presses, setting himself up as a printer.

Despite Gutenberg's personal failure, his cheap method of mass producing pages had freed the written word from the monopoly of the monasteries.

Answer: Hot Jazz

Broadway star Miss Baker's highly 'provocative' dress was immensely popular in her Paris revue, but in Vienna she drew angry complaints from Austria's Nazis, who accused her of public indecency. But what they really found offensive was not the amount of Miss Baker's skin on view but its colour.