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Free Trivia Answers to Questions
for week ending 25 December 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on Christmas:
1. A Bulgarian tradition is not to consume any animal products in the 40 days to midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Some are now replacing that with not using the internet or watching TV during that period.
2. When Mary Young married Brian Christmas in America in 2007, she became Mary Christmas. Her husband proudly boasts that he has a ‘Mary Christmas’ all year long.
3. Pitcairn Island holds its elections every Christmas Eve.
4. ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ is traditionally the last in any carols session.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions
for week ending 18 December 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on boxing:
1. Arthur Tunstall was secretary of the NSW Amateur Boxing Association for the last 60 years until it closed this month.
2. Jack Johnson became the first black heavyweight champion when he beat Tommy Burns in Sydney in 1908. On what appropriate and approaching public holiday did this happen? Boxing Day
3. In what sport is the score kept secret until the end of the contest? Boxing.
4. The four points on the body most vulnerable to a one-punch knockout are liver, solar plexus, chin and temples. (Lyle Brown’s Sports Quiz)
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
11 December 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on Australian politicians:
1. Former Australian Health Minister (now Prime Minister), Tony Abbott, runs marathons and cycles long distances.
2. Brian Harradine, an independent member of the Australian Senate from 1975 to 2005, had 13 children.
3. Independent member of the ACT Legislative Assembly, Michael Moore, lists three hobbies in Who’s Who. They are building, bushwalking and building sandcastles.
4. The second wife of former National Party MP Michael Cobb was Barbara Cobb. Who was his fourth wife? Barbara Cobb. He married her twice.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
4 December 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on dates:
1. Ask people this question: If a boy were aged five at the outbreak of World War I, in what year would he have been born? What will they answer? They will answer ‘nineteen-O-nine’. But no-one says ‘twenty-O-nine’ for 2009. We all say ‘two thousand and nine’. Will we make an adjustment for 2010? We’ll know next month.
2. Cryptic crossword clue: January, 2000 (9). The answer is midsummer. January is in midsummer, and the middle of ‘summer’ is MM, the Roman numerals for 2000. (Sydney Morning Herald)
3. The present millennium began on 1 January 2001.
4. The 2001 Australian election was held on 10 November. What two features of this date, 10-11-01, are special? It reads the same backwards and upside down.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
27 November 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on Tiger Woods:
1. On 10 November, 2009, 7000 spectators followed Tiger Woods around a Melbourne course when it was only a practice round.
2. Tiger Woods is part African, American, Thai, Chinese, native American and European. (Time)
3. Tiger Woods has won 11 of his 12 play-offs in majors.
4. After being ahead at the start of the last round, Tiger Woods has won all of his majors.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
20 November 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on mass murders:
1. Dr Harold Shipman murdered 215 of his patients between 1975 and 1998.
2. Martin Bryant’s murder of 35 people influenced new gun control laws and convinced an Australian news magazine to include him in a list of the country’s 100 most influential people..
3. After the April 1999 school massacre in Denver, Colorado that left 15 dead, President Clinton proposed that 18-year-olds only be allowed to purchase one handgun a month
4. Johannesburg, South, Africa used to have the world’s highest murder rate. Now it’s Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, followed by Caracas, Venezuela.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
13 November 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on Andre Agassi:
1. In his November, 2009 book, Andre Agassi revealed that he wore a wig, hated tennis and took drugs.
2. When Andy Roddick equalled the fastest ever recorded serve (239.7kmh) on 15 June 2003, Andre Agassi managed to get the ball back into play.
3. Besides Andre Agassi, the other American grand slam title winner with initials AA was Arthur Ashe.
4. The quote: ‘Damn, I Agassi, miss again. Mad.’ is a palindrome – it reads the same backwards. Try inventing a palindrome that makes sense and includes your full name. It’s a mammoth task.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
6 November 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on sailing:
1. If you sail around the world at 60 degrees south latitude, how often do you strike land? You don’t.
2. Sixteen yachts broke the Sydney to Hobart race record in the 1999 race.
3. British prime minister Sir Edward Heath won the Sydney to Hobart race in 1969.
4. The youngest and oldest skippers in the Sydney to Hobart race have been 17 and 84. (Sydney Morning Herald)
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
30 October 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on multiple marriages:
1. Chris Evert has now been married to an Australian (Greg Norman), a Brit (John Lloyd) and an American (Andy Mill), so she now only needs a Frenchman for a matrimonial grand slam. (Dan Daly, Washington Times)
2. Larry King has married seven times.
3. Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, officiated at the weddings of 10,000 couples on 14 October 2009.
4. Nigerian Mohammadu Bello Abubakar, an 84-year-old, agreed in September 2008 to divorce 82 of his 86 wives. (Telegraph)
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
23 October 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on the World Masters Games:
1. Ruth Frith set a world record and won a gold medal with her shot put throw of 4.07 metres in the World Masters Games 100-104 age division. She says that she has never eaten vegetables.
2. Ruth Frith was the only competitor in her age division of the shot put, so she was both first and last.
3. O. Santa Claus, aged 80, competed in the 10-kilometre road race, 100-metre race and the 80-metre swimming.
4. Santa Claus, who is from Sydney, competed bare-footed in the 10-kilometre road race and 100-metre race.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
16 October 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on Samoa:
1. Samoans all wear white to church on Sundays. (Sydney Morning Herald)
2. Most Samoans contemplate for 15 minutes from when a bell sounds at about 6pm. They refuse to cross the road during this time.
3.. Last month Samoa became the first country since the 1970s to change the side of the road on which cars are driven. The change was to driving on the left.
4. Polynesian Airlines’ only plane was damaged when it ran onto the grass verge after landing at Apia, Samoa, in December 1996. (Telegraph)
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
9 October 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on Olympic cities:
1. Rio de Janeiro will be the first South American city to host a modern summer Olympic Games.
2. The only modern summer Olympics to have been held in the southern hemisphere were in Australia’s Sydney and Melbourne.
3. No modern summer Olympic Games have been held in Africa.
4. The cities for the modern summer Olympics have been 1896 Athens, 1900 Paris, 1904 St Louis, 1906 Athens, 1908 London, 1912 Stockholm, 1920 Antwerp, 1924 Paris, 1928 Amsterdam, 1932 Los Angeles, 1936 Berlin, 1948 London, 1952 Helsinki, 1956 Melbourne and Sweden (equestrian), 1960 Rome, 1964 Tokyo, 1968 Mexico, 1972 Munich, 1976 Montreal, 1980 Moscow, 1984 Los Angeles, 1988 Seoul, 1992 Barcelona, 1996 Atlanta, 2000 Sydney, 2004 Athens and 2008 Beijing.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
2 October 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on Australian football:
1. There were 40 players on each side in the first AFL match in 1858. (Winning at Trivial Pursuit)
2. Only one of the St George/Illawarra players was seen to shake hands with a Melbourne player after Melbourne beat them in the final minutes of the 1999 first grade rugby league final. Most of the other St George team players were crying.
3. When Mal Melinga formally announced that he would not stand for parliament he was announcing that he would stand for parliament. During his interview on ABC radio in Canberra to make his announcement he changed his mind.
4. In 2005, present Millionaire Hot Seat compere, Eddie McGuire, was president of Collingwood Football Club, Channel Nine football commentator, Channel Nine quiz commentator, 3MMM radio broadcaster and director of Athletics Australia.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
25 September 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on walking:
1. Peregrine Adventures have up to 800 porters on Himalayan tracks at any one time. (Pursuits)
2. Frenchman Rémy Bricka crossed the Atlantic Ocean on his 1988 5636km walk. He was on ski-floats attached to his legs. (Guinness World Records)
3. Seven suburbs are passed through on the popular walking and jogging track around Sydney’s Iron Cove. They are Drummoyne, Russell Lea, Rodd Point, Five Dock, Haberfield, Lilyfield and Rozelle.
4. What variation of walking, that you probably have not used since you were about six or seven, is faster than walking but slower than running? Skipping. Could you do it naturally now at your first attempt? Probably yes.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
18 September 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on the US Open tennis:
1. You can now be a ball boy or ball girl for the US Open at any age. Two grey-haired, nearly bald, ball boys starred in this year’s US Open.
2. Australia’s Anastasia Rodionova was narrowly beaten by Kateryna Bondarenko in 2009. Combined, their names have 17 vowels.
3. In a queue arranged alphabetically according to surname, seventh-seeded Vera Zvonareva would be certain that she’d be last.
4. All top 16 seeds in the men’s singles reached the third round of this year’s US Open. That had never happened before in any grand slam men’s singles in the open era.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
11 September 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on the Kennedys:
1. Seven of Senator Edward Kennedy’s relatives died before middle age. His oldest brother, Joseph Jr, died in World War II; the next two brothers, president John Fitzgerald Kennedy and senator Robert Kennedy, were assassinated; his sister, Katherine, died in a plane crash; a nephew, Michael Kennedy, died in a skiing accident; a second nephew, David Kennedy, died of an overdose; and a third nephew, John F Kennedy Jr, was killed when the plane he was piloting crashed. (Telegraph)
2. Robert Kennedy’s assassin was Sirhan Sirhan.
3. Only one president, John F Kennedy, has been Catholic.
4. The three most popular American presidents have been Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy and Bill Clinton (Sydney Morning Herald)
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
4 September 2009
Answers to last week’s question on American synonyms:
The American equivalents (in italics) for these English/Australian words are:
Accelerator gas pedal, autumn fall, biscuit cookie, blow horn honk, bonnet (of car) hood, boot(of car) trunk, bumper (of car) fender, car auto, caravan park trailer park, chemist drugstore, chips (potato) fries, crisps chips, dollar note dollar bill, draughts (game) checkers, each apiece, exhaust pipe (on car) tailpipe, expressway turnpike, ground floor first floor, footpath sidewalk, full stop (at end of sentence) period, hand brake park brake, jam jelly, jumper sweater, lift (to avoid stairs) elevator, lolly candy, maths math, mobile phone cell phone, mum mom, peak hour rush hour, pedestrian crossing crosswalk, petrol gas, poker machine slot machine or slot, prepare (a meal) fix, railway railroad, restaurant diner, rubbish trash, second place first runner-up, service station filling station or gas station, soft drink soda, somewhere someplace, take-away food food to go, tap faucet, torch flashlight, tomato sauce ketchup, tram trolley, tramlines (on tennis court) alley, ute truck, yell holler, zed zee
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
28 August 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on Afghanistan:
1. One of the candidates in the 2009 Afghanistan election was Dr Abdullah Abdullah.
2. Until 2001, in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, it was illegal for women to own a TV set; attend school or university; have head, face or body uncovered; attend sporting events; play sport or work outside the home except in health work.
3. Playing music, owning a VCR and owning books published outside Afghanistan were all crimes in Afghanistan until 2001.
4. In April 1997, the Islamic government in Kabul banned attendance by girls from all Afghanistan schools.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
21 August 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on long names:
1. When Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii was nine, a court made her a ward of the state so that her name could be changed from the one she hated. The government allowed other children to retain their names of Number 16 Bus Shelter, Violence and Midnight Chardonnay. (Sydney Morning Herald)
2. Germany’s Constitutional Court this year prevented a Munich dentist from calling herself Frieda Rosemarie Thalheim-Kunz-Hallstein because a triple-barrelled name “lessened the impact of what it was supposed to do, namely identify.”
3. Talebulamaineiilikenamainavaleniveivakabulaimakulalakeba was a Fijian cricketer in the 1960s. (Sydney Morning Herald)
4. Germany’s Economics Minister is Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenburg.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
14 August 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on swimming:
(1) The 2009 world swimming championships set the world record for world records (43) at the one swimming meeting.
(2) The release of the first high-tech suit, Speedo’s LZR Racer, in February 2008 resulted in 108 world swimming records being broken that year.
(3) If the Speedo LZR Racer was as good as claimed, would it have been worthwhile for a swimmer to wear two of the suits at once? Yes. Some medal-winning swimmers at the Beijing Olympics wore multiple suits to help with buoyancy and flotation; some swimmers at the 2008 European short course titles were reported to have worn as many as four suits. (Sydney Morning Herald 18-3-09)
(4) Women are the most nearly equal of men in backstroke. (Lyle Brown’s Sports Quiz)
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
7 August 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on Australian commercial radio survivors:
(1) Ian Craig called his last race on 24 June this year. He was the race broadcaster at Sydney’s 2KY for 41 years and at 2UE for the three years before that.
(2) For many years until last April, Mike Jeffreys hosted 2CC Canberra’s breakfast programme while standing.
(3) Rex Hunt has had a fishing program on 3AW Melbourne for 23 years.
(4) Alan Jones has topped the ratings for Australia’s hardest shift, Sydney breakfast, for 15 years. He open his program each morning with the word ‘Well’.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
31 July 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on Australian cricket:
(1) In Shane Warne’s record-breaking last test match as a wicket-taker, the top-scoring batsman in Australia’s second innings was Shane Warne.
(2) The maiden surname of Stuart MacGill’s friend who became his wife was Friend (Rachel Friend).
(3) All the players in the 1886 Australian cricket team playing against Britain were Aboriginal.
(4) On 18 June 2005, the Sydney Daily Telegraph ran a preview of the match scheduled for later in the day. It included these comments: ‘Prime time television will tonight dish up what promises to be the most terrible game of cricket anyone could ever see. Australia’s tour of England kicks off with the alleged excitement of the one-day series. The Aussies play Bangladesh - that most mighty of cricket nations - in what will be a sad, one-sided affair. England flogged the hopeless Bangladesh side in a game on Thursday night (Australian time). They didn’t even lose a wicket on their way to victory…I always look forward with great anticipation to the Ashes tour…But Bangladesh? Please…Little resistance is offered from the likes of Zimbabwe and Bangladesh…more cynical fans (like me) say no more…If you were a 12-year-old in Bangladesh, who was lucky enough to have access to a television set, what could possibly be attractive about watching your countrymen getting flogged every time they took to the field?…The Bangladeshis were dragged out of their practice gear and tossed into the elite world of cricket far too early…they are light years away from being near Australia or England…What the ICC has created is an embarrassing mess. Tonight, at 7.30, smack bang in the middle of prime time in Australia, 12 very young, inexperienced cricketers will take on the best in the world. They will be hopelessly outclassed - which must be humiliating and demoralising for them…What we are about to see just isn’t cricket.’ Which team won?
Bangladesh, of course.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
24 July 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on the moon:
(1) The date of man’s first step on the moon was 20 July 1969 US time and 21 July 1969 Australian time.
(2) Dr Harrison Schmidt was the last person to walk on the moon.
(3) No man-made object is visible from the moon, even though the claims are often made on behalf of the Great Wall of China for that honour. The Great Wall is one of many objects visible from low Earth orbit.
(4) China’s media gave no mention at all to the first moon landing.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
17 July 2009
Answers to last week’s questions about the moon:
(1) The first manned moon landing, in July 1969, was heralded as being the start of regular moon landings, including tourist trips to the moon and a permanent settlement, but there have been no moon landings since December 1972.
(2) The first word said on the moon was 'Houston'.
(3) No women have walked on the moon.
(4) Alfred M Worden was the command module pilot in the US Apollo 15 moon mission while David Scott and James Irwin were on the moon. He was 3596km from them and thus became the most isolated human ever. (Guinness World Records)
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
10 July 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on smoking:
(1) Guinness World Records refused to acknowledge the world’s youngest smoker because accepting for a record the two-year-old Chinese boy who smokes a pack-a-day to relieve hernia pain would encourage others to break it.
(2) The world's largest tobacco manufacturer is the Chinese Government.
(3) Chinese government tobacco factories produce 900 brands of cigarettes.
(4) The first studies showing the relationship between smoking and lung cancer were funded by Adolf Hitler.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
3 July 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on Wimbledon:
(1) Until last year, if the whole day’s play at Wimbledon was washed out, your tickets were valid for that day only and there was no refund.
(2) There were 22 “ovas” (players with surnames ending in “ova”) in the main draw of this year’s ladies’ singles. Of the 128 ladies in the singles draw, 48 had surnames ending in ‘a’.
(3) Na Li has the shortest name in the ladies’ singles and Barbora Zahlavova Strycova and Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez have the longest.
(4) Lindsay Davenport, Virginia Ruzic and Mark Edmondson each lost a Wimbledon final after having match point.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
26 June 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on Iran:
(1) Eleven thousand prisoners escaped in the largest ever jail break in Tehran, Iran.
(2) The penalty for a non-Muslim man who rapes a Muslim woman in Iran is death. What is the penalty if they have sex by consent? Death.
(3) Andre Agassi’s father represented Iran in boxing. (Sydney Morning Herald)
(4) After “Sir Edward”, as he was known to airport personnel, was stripped of his nationality by Iran, Britain refused his attempts at entry and the Belgian authorities lost his file. They found the file 11 years later, in September 1999, and he was able to leave the airport at Paris. (BBC)
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
19 June 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on World War II:
(1) The vessel that destroyed the submarine USS Tang in October, 1944, was the USS Tang—she sank herself with her own torpedo.
(2) The parents of World War II allied supreme commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, were pacifists.(Book of Facts)
(3) Germany didn’t lose any aircraft carriers during World War II because it didn’t have any. (Telegraph)
(4) the World War II armistice signed in the railway carriage at Rethondes was written backwards. The typist had the carbon paper in the wrong way, and no-one noticed.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
12 June 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on spelling:
(1) Kavya Shivashankar became the US national spelling champion last month.
(2) The letter ‘J’ was first used in the English language only about 500 years ago.
(3) Most people would consider ‘barbeque’ and miniscule’ to be correct spellings, but they are misspellings of barbecue and minuscule.
(4) The letter which begins most words in the English dictionary is ‘S’.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
5 June 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on South Africa:
(1) The new president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, has three wives and 19 children.
(2) Jacob Zuma has been charged with 483 counts of corruption.
(3) When South Africa held a competition to suggest a name for a new national park at Cape Peninsula, the winner of the 140 entries submitted was ‘Cape Peninsula National Park’.
(4) All of the countries Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand and South Africa competed in the Pacific School Games in Sydney, even though South Africa is thousands of kilometres from the Pacific Ocean.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
29 May 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on newspapers:
(1) In the Sydney Sun-Herald comics section for ‘May 17-May 23, 2009’, a puzzle with a prize of ‘a set of musical instruments’ showed the following in small print: ‘Terms and Conditions: Entrants must be 18 or over. Entries close on Tuesday at 11.59...’ The puzzle was: Can you fill in the numbers that are missing when you count from 1 to 10? 1 2 3 4 _ 6 _ 8 9 10
(2) The Dutch Weekly is published fortnightly
(3) ‘Yesterday’ appears in one of the first two paragraphs of half of newspaper news items.
(4) Up to 63,000 trees have been used to make the paper needed for one Sunday edition of The New York Times. (Book of Facts)
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
22 May 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on Iceland:
(1) Johanna Sigurdardottir, elected prime minister of Iceland last month, is the world’s first openly lesbian prime minister, but she would also be doing well in the longest prime minister surname category.
(2) Iceland has no military, railways, safety railings, lifts or weeds.
(3) Iceland’s elephant birds cannot fly when they lose sight of the sea and fall to the ground.
(4) Iceland consumes the most Coca-Cola per capita of any country (University of Sydney diary)
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
15 May 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on pigs:
(1) ‘Pig’ and ‘swine’ mean the same thing.
(2) If you see a pig looking up at the sky, you should consult an optometrist or a psychiatrist. Pigs cannot look up at the sky.
(3) Both of the words ‘guinea pig’ are incorrect descriptions. The animal is from South America and is a rodent.
(4) Half the world’s pigs live in China.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
8 May 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on disease:
(1) The current swine flu epidemic may have become pandemic, depending on how strictly you take the definition. Epidemic is ‘disease prevalent among a community at a special time’. Pandemic is ‘disease prevalent over a whole country or over the whole world’. Endemic is ‘regularly or only found among specified people or in a specified country’.
(2) The only certain way of making the body immune from measles is getting measles.
(3) An almost certain cure for a woman’s arthritic pains, but unavailable to men, is pregnancy. (Absolute Trivia)
(4) We know all bout antibiotics. ‘Biotic’ is something relating to life or living things (Concise Oxford Dictionary)
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
1 May 2009
Answers to last week’s questions about anagrams of occupations:
(1) An anagram of ‘dud sales career’ is ‘used car dealer’.
(2) An anagram of ‘moon starers’ is astronomers’.
(3) An anagram of ‘go get soil’ is ‘geologist”.
(4) An anagram of ‘rodent@piracy.com’ is ‘company director’.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
24 April 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on Somalia:
(1) When three Somalis were killed in April while holding an American captain, Somali pirates were also holding about 230 sailors from more than a dozen ships.
(2). Comprised of a former British protectorate and an Italian colony, Somalia was created in 1960 when the two territories merged. (BBC)
(3) The main language of Somalia is Somali, as well as Arabic, Italian and English.
(4) The attempts to form a government for Somalia in 2000 and 2004 were held in Djibouti and Kenya.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
17 April 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on the USA:
(1) April 15 in the USA is the day tax returns are due.
(2) The original name of St Paul, capital of Minnesota, was Pig’s Eye.
(3) Texas was once an independent republic.
(4) There used to be a town in West Virginia named “6”, so it had no letters.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
10 April 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on cats:
(1) When a major blood vessel in a cat's chest vibrates it purrs (The Third Degree of Trivia)
(2) After ‘Puss’, the most popular name in recent years for an Australian cat has been ‘Cat’.
(3) Cats are banned on Lord Howe Island, largely to protect the Lord Howe Island woodhen, once one of the rarest birds in the world. (Telegraph)
(4) A cat uses whiskers to measure whether a space is too small to squeeze through. (Absolute Trivia)
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
3 April 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on dates:
(1) Why did Burger King publish a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new menu item, a Left-Handed Whopper, which would include the same ingredients but all rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers? It was April Fools’ Day (Telegraph)
(2) The BBC Panorama programme provided coverage of Switzerland’s spaghetti harvest on April 1.
(3) The next date with all odd numbers will be 1/1/3111.
(4) After 28/08/888 the next date with all even numbers was 02/02/2000.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
27 March 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on McDonald’s:
(1) Florida resident Latreasa L. Goodman rang the emergency number 911 from McDonald’s in March 2009 because the restaurant had run out of McNuggets.
(2) Geoffrey Giuliano, the original actor to play the McDonald’s clown, Ronald McDonald, became a vegetarian.
(3) McDonald’s opened a ski-through burger stand in Lindvallen Sweden. (Sydney Morning Herald)
(4) India’s first McDonald's restaurant was the first in the world to be beefless. Mutton was used instead.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
20 March 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on Sydney TV:
(1) The last time that all Sydney’s free-to-air TV channels covered the same event live was 22 February 2009 - the memorial service for Victorian bushfire victims. Before that it was 6 September 1997 - the funeral service for Diana Spencer.
(2) Besides news, the only programme shown on Sydney TV at the same time seven days a week is The Simpsons (6pm).
(3) The time when all Sydney’s three commercial TV channels are showing the same program type from Tuesdays to Fridays is 2.30am to 3am—home shopping.
(4) The two words that Channels Ten and Nine like to use immediately before their main news item are ‘but first’.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
13 March 2009
nswers to last week’s questions on jails:
(1) Vassilis Paleokostas escaped from the high-security Korydallos prison in Athens, Greece, in 2006 by helicopter. He escaped from the same prison last month (February 2009) by helicopter again. (Sydney Morning Herald)
(2) Inmates ran Guatemala’s Pavon prison for more than 10 years until it was stormed by 3000 soldiers and police in September 2006. A prisoner-elected “order committee” was the sole authority because governments abandoned the prison. (Sydney Morning Herald)
(3) Thieves broke into Melbourne’s Pentridge jail in 1874 to rob the superintendent’s office. (Sydney Morning Herald)
(4) Bassam Hamzy, a maximum security prisoner at Lithgow jail, made 19,000 mobile telephone calls in six weeks, or an average of once every five minutes, 24 hours a day. He was the leader of a drug ring and kept his phone hidden while making the calls.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
6 March 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on executions:
(1) How did 27-year-old identical twin brothers R. Sathis Raj and Sabarish Raj escape being convicted and hanged on drugs charges in Malaysia last month?The court said that it was because police had trouble identifying which twin was in possession of the drugs. (The Australian 7-2-09)
(2) People were executed in Ukraine in 1996-97 for offences such as stealing ball-point pens, attempting to steal tax receipts and pricking female cyclists in the buttocks with sticks and needles. (Sydney Morning Herald)
(3) Two ladies were sentenced to death by firing squad in Somalia in February 2001 for “unnatural behaviour”, after one of the lesbians reported the other for being too rough.
(4) Before he was hanged in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, in 1645, 80-year-old clergyman John Lowes was forced to conduct his own funeral service. (London Telegraph)
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27 February 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on space:
(1) The head-on collision between Russian and America last month occurred in space above Siberia. It was the first collision between satellites.
(2) The closest star to us is our sun.
(3) The sun shines because of nuclear fusion reactions. (Reader's Digest Book of Facts)
(4) One life is known to have been lost because of being directly hit by an extra-terrestrial object. A dog was struck dead by a small meteorite at Nakala, Egypt, in 1911. (Reader's Digest Book of Facts)
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
20 February 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on birthdays
(1) You had a better than 75% chance of getting this answer correct. What famous person was born on 12 February 200 years ago? (a) Abraham Lincoln (b) Charles Darwin. In fact you had a 100% chance of getting it right. They were born on the same day.
(2) The most frequently-sung song in English is Happy Birthday.
(3) Happy Birthday was written by two Sunday School teachers.
(4) A murder occurred on both of the only two birthday observances recorded in the Bible. Pharaoh killed his baker (Genesis 40: 20,22) and King Herod killed John the Baptist (Matthew 14:6-10).
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
13 February 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on music.
(1) The singer charged with negligence last month for lighting fireworks that set a Bangkok club ablaze on New Year’s Day, killing 65 revellers, is from the pop group Burn. (Sydney Morning Herald)
(2) Decca Records said ‘We don’t like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out.’ when rejecting the Beatles in 1962. (Signs of the Times)
(3) Only one choir entered the 1978 Arklow Musical Festival choral contest. It came second. The Dublin Welsh Male Voice Choir failed to win first prize as a punishment from the judges for arriving 45 minutes late. (Book of Heroic Failures)
(4) Sydney church group Hillsong’s For All You’ve Done album debuted at number one on the Australian Record Industry Association’s charts in July 2004. Sales from the music stand at their church totalled 9766. Only three were from other outlets.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
6 February 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on families
(1) On 26 January, a lady gave birth to her eighth child in Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Centre in California. What was the age difference between this and her first child? The second birth of live octuplets in world history took just five minutes. (Sydney Morning Herald)
(2) The three boys who gained the first three places in each of their Years 10, 11 and 12 at Sydney’s Normanhurst Boys’ High School in 1995, 1996 and 1997 were triplets. (Sydney Morning Herald)
(3) The school captains at Sydney’s Kirrawee Public School for the years 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998 and 2000 were sisters. (Sydney Morning Herald)
(4) If a triplet dies, the other two are still triplets. The word refers to their being parts of a multiple birth. Any two triplets are also twins.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
30 January 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on air transport:
(1) After this month’s ditching of a plane where all 150+ on board survived, the Hudson River is a safe landing place as well as a river in New York State and a border of New York City.
(2) When pioneer Australian aviator Nancy Bird married Charles Walton, a hyphen was placed in an unexpected position and she became Nancy-Bird Walton.
(3) Dick Smith justified his claim that lowering Australian air safety standards would save lives by explaining that it would make air travel much cheaper, enabling more people to fly and thus less on the roads where deaths are more likely.
(4) Three people left California on 11 April 1996 to set a record on a flight to the east coast. The plane crashed after one-third of the journey and all were killed. The pilot was aged seven.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
23 January 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on American presidents:
(1) President George W Bush said ‘More and more of our imports come from overseas’.
(2) A US soldier said ‘President Bush sends his regards’ to Saddam Hussein when he discovered him living down a hole on 13 December 2003.
(3) The ‘W’ in the name of US president George W Bush stands for Walker.
(4) President Hoover gave 100 per cent of his federal salary for his 47 years in government to charity. (Absolute Trivia)
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
16 January 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on oldest people:
(1) The world’s oldest person, Portugal's Maria de Jesus, who died this month at age 115, never learned to read or write. She never attended school. (Sun-Herald)
(2) The oldest ever heir to the British throne is Prince Charles (Sydney Morning Herald)
(3) Jeanne Calment was 120 when she made her first CD. This was in October 1995 when she was declared the oldest person ever whose age could be authenticated. She died in 1997 at 122.
(4) Dot Dawson retired in 2005 aged 99 after 75 years in radio. Her famous husband, Smoky Dawson, compered his country music programme networked from Sydney North Shore’s 2NSB, until age 93.
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
9 January 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on the best of 2008:
(1) The most popular name for baby boys in 2008 in Australian states and nationally, as well as in Britain and New Zealand, was Jack.
(2) The most popular name for baby girls in 2008 in Australia was Mia.
(3) The most popular tourist attraction was Times Square with 3,000 visitors an hour.
(4) The best invention of 2008 was The Retail DNA Test (Time magazine)
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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending
2 January 2009
Answers to last week’s questions on the worst of 2008:
(1) Bronx Mowgli, son of Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz, was crowned the worst celebrity baby name of 2008 in a survey of 5,000 visitors to website BabyNames.com.
(2) Jagger Joseph Blue, daughter of actress Soleil Moon Frye and Jason Goldberg, was the site’s choice for worst girl's name of 2008.
(3) The most dangerous vacation spot in 2008 was Afghanistan.
(4) Bulgaria’s women’s ice hockey team lost an Olympic pre-qualifying match to Slovakia 82 - 0.
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