Put Your Best Foot Forward Trivia Quiz

Answer: Alexei Leonov

Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first person to walk in space on March 18, 1965, when he conducted a twelve-minute space walk during a Voskhod 2 mission. He was also selected to be the first Russian to walk on the moon, but the moon landing was cancelled.

Edward Higgins White, Jr. was the first American to walk in space, when he made a spacewalk three months later on June 3, 1965. The first non-Soviet and non-American to walk in space was Frenchman Jean-Loup Chretien in 1988.

Answer: Charles Curtis

Charles Curtis was the Vice President during Herbert Hoover's administration from 1929 to 1933. Depending on the source, he is credited with being one-fourth to one-eighth Native American, with his maternal heritage being Kaw, Osage and Pottawatomie.

He had close ties to his Native American relatives; he spoke the Kaw language before he spoke English, and he spent part of his youth living on the Kaw reservation in Kansas. Despite the discriminatory practices of the era, his background did not hamper his political career - he bragged about rising from "Kaw teepee to the Capitol".

Answer: Ludovico de Varthema

Much like Burton, the Italian de Varthema (also spelled di Barthema) had a fascination with the Middle East. Besides traveling throughout Arabia, he also visited India and northern Africa and circumnavigated the African continent. His accounts of the pilgrimage to Mecca were the most detailed known to Europeans until the visit of English sailor Joseph Pitts in 1680. Burton's famous visit occurred in 1853 when he traveled with a caravan of pilgrims from Medina to Mecca.

Answer: John Davis

John Davis, an American seal hunter, is usually credited for landing at Hughes Bay on February 7, 1821. He was only there for an hour, however, which didn't give him time to confirm that he had reached the continent. Some sources claim that Davis actually landed on an island, not the continent and give credit to Jules Dumont d'Urville, a French explorer for doing so in 1840.

The details of his expedition, however, have also been questioned. New Zealander Alexander von Tunzelmann is another contender, as he was a crew member on a Norwegian whaling ship that was the first to make a documented landing on the continent proper on January 24, 1895.

Others from the ship also claimed to be the first to set foot on the continent.

Answer: Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh

In 1875, the crew of the British ship HMS Challenger recorded the lowest point on earth (about 11,000 meters or 36,000 feet) in the Marianas Trench of the western Pacific. A diving exploration was not possible at this time due to the effects that it would have on human physiology.

In the 1930s, Swiss scientist and inventor, Auguste Piccard, who had constructed and manned the first stratospheric balloon, decided to use similar technology for developing a deep-sea diving vehicle called a bathyscaphe.

In 1960, his son Jacques Piccard joined U.S. Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh in the bathyscaphe called 'Trieste' for the five-hour, seven-mile descent to the bottom of the sea. They remained at the bottom for thirty minutes, observing the deep-sea marine life, including shrimp and jellyfish, before making the considerably quicker three-hour ascent to the surface.

Answer: Richard Bass

Richard Bass, the owner of Snowbird Ski Resort in Utah, was in his mid-50s when he completed the quest that he had undertaken with scarcely any mountaineering experience. Since Bass's climb, the seven summits list has been modified to replace Kosciuszko for Carstensz Pyramid in Indonesian New Guinea.

Some other sources claim that Mount Wilhelm in Papua New Guinea should be considered the highest peak in Oceania since Indonesia is part of Asia. The other peaks in the list are Aconcagua (South America), Denali (North America), Elbrus (Europe), Everest (Asia), Kilimanjaro (Africa) and Vinson Massif (Antarctica).

Answer: Robert Walpole

10 Downing Street first became the office of the Prime Minister in 1730 when Robert Walpole accepted the residence from King George II, on the condition that it would be used by future First Lords of the Treasury. He moved into the building in 1735 after it had been refurbished and expanded to include two neighboring buildings.

A previous building on the site had been leased in 1581 to Sir Thomas Knyvet by Queen Elizabeth I. Knyvet later became famous for arresting Guy Fawkes who had tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605.

Answer: Karl Bushby

English adventurer Karl Bushby was in the middle of his attempt to walk around the world when he crossed a frozen section of the Bering Strait with Dimitri Kieffer in 2006. Unfortunately, they had failed to get permission from the Russian government and were arrested.

Russian Dmitri Shparo and his son, Matvey, had made the reverse journey across from Russia to Alaska in 1998, but they did so on skis as opposed to walking. There have also been reports of Inuit crossing the Bering Strait in recent times, but none is adequately documented.

Answer: Graham Fagg and Philippe Cozette

Englishman Graham Fagg and Frenchman Philippe Cozette had won lotteries to be the first people to meet under the English Channel when the two sides of the 30 mile/50 kilometer tunnel linked up. The historic meeting took place on December 1, 1990, when the men met, shook hands and exchanged flags.

Answer: Willem Janszoon

As with many discoveries, there are other contenders to the title, including Dirk Hartog, William Dampier and Abel Tasman, but Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon (also known as Willem Jansz) had the first documented landing on Australia in 1606, 170 years before James Cook claimed the area for England. Janszoon mapped a large section of the Australian coastline, but he didn't realize it was a separate continent; he mistakenly believed that the land was connected to New Guinea.