Free TRIVIA ANSWERS for 2012

On this page we broaden our scope from the unusual aspects of Sydney geography to the unusual aspects of world geography and to quirky matters in general.

Trivia questions are at Free Trivia Questions 2004 and at Free Trivia Questions 2005 and at Free Trivia Questions 2006 and at Free Trivia Questions 2007 and at Free Trivia Questions 2008 and at Free Trivia Questions 2009 and at Free Trivia Questions 2010 and at Free Trivia Questions 2011 and at Free Trivia Questions 2012

Free answers to the trivia questions are at Free Trivia Answers 2004 and at Free Trivia Answers 2005 and at Free Trivia Answers 2006 and at Free Trivia Answers 2007 and at Free Trivia Answers 2008 and at Free Trivia Answers 2009 and at Free Trivia Answers 2010 and at Free Trivia Answers 2011 and at Free Trivia Answers 2012

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 11 May 2012

Answers to last week's questions on Rupert Murdoch:

1. Rupert Murdoch's first newspaper was Adelaide's afternoon tabloid, The News.

2. Rupert Murdoch was 72 when his daughter, Chloe, was born.

3. Rupert Murdoch was one of two Australians listed in the top 100 most influential people of the 20th Century by "International Who's Who". The other was Sir Donald Bradman.

4. The first name of the third child of Lachlan (son of Rupert) and Sarah Murdoch starts with two different vowels - Aerin.

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 4 May 2012

Answers to last week's questions on Mormons and marriage:

1. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon church) abolished polygamy in 1890.

2. As the Mormon church abolished polygamy more than a century ago, how many polygamists are estimated to live in the largely Mormon state Utah now? Only between 20,000 and 40,000. (Sydney Morning Herald)

3. Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had a minimum of 33 and up to 50 wives, including 12 who were already married. (Salt Lake City Messenger)

4. His successor, Brigham Young, had 55 wives.

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 27 April 2012

Answers to last week's questions on the Greens party:

1, The leader of the Greens who announced his retirement in April is Bob Brown.

2. For the most entries in the Sydney telephone directory out of black, brown, grey and white, Bob Brown's surname ranks first.

3. Shauna Forrest represented the Greens in 2001, 2003 and 2004 local and state elections.

4. New Zealand Greens Party MP Nandor Tanczos uses a skateboard for transport to parliament.

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 20 April 2012

Answers to last week's questions on rowing:

1. Tenton Oldfield, an old boy of Shore (a school that stars in rowing) came to be the star of this year's Oxford/Cambridge race by swimming near the boats at the half-way mark and causing a rerun.

2. The most popular sport in Sydney between 1830 and 1880 was rowing.

3. The annual Todd River Regatta in Alice Springs is generally held in the absence of any water. Competitors simply pick up their boats and run.

4. The Todd River Regatta was cancelled in 1993 because the river had water in it.

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 13 April 2012

Answers to last week's questions on the Titanic:

1. The Titanic sank 100 years ago, on 15 April 1912.

2. The last survivor of the Titanic, Millvina Dean from England, was only nine weeks old at the time of the sinking.

3. The Titanic only carried enough lifeboats for approximately half the passengers.

4. When his film Raise the Titanic became a financial disaster (at $260 million it was probably the most expensive film ever made), Lord Grade said 'It would have been cheaper to have lowered the Atlantic'.

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 6 April 2012

Answers to last week’s questions on Easter:

1. Good Friday fell on a Monday in 1899, when a horse called Good Friday fell in a race at Wolverhampton, England, on Easter Monday.(Sydney Morning Herald)

2. ‘Easter’ is mentioned once, as a mistranslation, in the King James Version of the Bible, but not in other versions.

3. Easter Island was named by the first European to visit there, on Easter Sunday, 1722.

4. The feature of the Easter Island flag is a red carving which looks like a hammock with a human head on each end.

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 30 March 2012

Answers to last week's questions on Tonga:

1. King George Tupou V awarded himself his rows of medals. (Sydney Morning Herald 20-3-12)

2. King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV of Tonga's maximum weight was just over 200kg.

3. King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV of Tonga travelled through the country's main centre around the beginning of this millennium by push-bike in order to lose weight. He lost 110kg. (Sydney Morning Herald 11-11-04)

4. The first country to greet the new day is Tonga.

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 23 March 2012

Answers to last week's questions on Singapore:

1. Singapore fell to the Japanese in World War II 70 years ago last month.

2. Chewing gum was banned in Singapore until 2003.

3. The fine, in Australian dollars, for dropping a piece of paper such as a bus ticket on the street in Singapore is $1000.

4. Of (a) not flushing the toilet (b) passing water in an elevator (c) having a car fuel tank less than three-quarters full at the causeway and (d) shearing sheep on Sundays, only (d) is legal in Singapore.

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 16 March 2012

Answers to last week's questions on floods:

1. The coverage of Queensland's floods in Rockhampton's The Morning Bulletin on 6 January 2011 quoted piggery owner Sid Everingham as saying 'more than 30,000 pigs have been floating down the Dawson River'. The paper's correction noted that Sid actually said '30 sows and pigs'. (Media Watch 7-2-11)

2. A spokesman for the Clarence State Emergency Services has the surname Manyweathers.

3. The surname of the person responsible for how much water was released over the spillways of dams in south-east Queensland during the January 2011 floods is Spiller. (Sydney Morning Herald 17-1-11)

4. The last time that St Mark's Square in Venice flooded was probably last week. It floods on average 60 times a year.

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 9 March 2012

Answers to last week's questions on World War I:

1. The world's last surviving World War I veteran, Florence Green, was 111 when she died last month.

2. The average age of the 16 Australian World War 1 veterans who were still alive in 1996 was 100.

3. The British K-submarines, developed in 1917, were not very successful in World War I for the British. K-1 sank after colliding with K-4. K-2 caught fire on its first test dive. K-3 plunged inexplicably to the sea bed, re-surfacing only to sink after being rammed by K-6. K-4 ran aground and K-5 foundered. K-14 sprang a leak before its first trial and during one celebrated manoeuvre in the North Sea collided with K-22, which used to be K-13 but was renamed after it keeled over while on seaworthiness trials. K-14 sank, while K-22 was damaged beyond repair after getting in the way of HMS Inflexible. In the same manoeuvre, K-17 was struck by HMS Fearless, having already been hit by K-7, thereby incapacitating itself. On observing this mayhem, K-4 stopped engines, altered course and was rammed by K-6 which later got stuck on the ocean bed. Better still, K-15 sank in Portsmouth Harbour before going anywhere or doing anything. (Stephen Pile, The Return of Heroic Failures)

4. The two Pacific countries which have a public holiday to commemorate not their greatest victory but one of their worst battle defeats are Australia and New Zealand, with their observance of Anzac Day.

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 2 March 2012

Answers to last week's questions on leap years:

1. A bissextile year is another name for a leap year.

2. They were all born on February 29.

3. Two Olympic Games were not held in leap years: 1900 was not a leap year and there was an extra Olympics in 1906.

4. The next Olympic Games that will not be held in a leap year will be in 2100. Years ending in 00 are not leap years, except for those divisible by 400.

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 24 February 2012

Answers to last week's questions on World War II:

1. The Australian city that was originally named Palmerston (after an English prime minister) before being renamed after a vegetarian (Charles Darwin) was Darwin.

2. No Australian citizens fought in World War II because Australians were British citizens until a constitution change in 1949. (2UE)

3. World War II ended in South Australia in August 2002 when Premier Mike Rann announced that 'the war is over'. This followed the discovery that their WWII had not technically ended because the Emergency Powers Act had not been rescinded. (BBC 17 August 2002; Sunday Telegraph 18 August 2002)

4. In September 1942 a Japanese plane dropped bombs in an attempt to start Oregon forest fires. It had been carried across the Pacific by submarine. The bombing wasn't revealed until many years after World War II. (Book of Facts)

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 17 February 2012

Answers to last week's questions on Queen Elizabeth II:

1. This month Queen Elizabeth is celebrating the 60th anniversary of her accession to the British throne.

2. Queen Elizabeth threw a tennis racquet and shoes at Prince Phillip during their tour of Australia in 1954.

3. When Queen Elizabeth arrived in New Zealand on 23 February 2002, their prime minister was in another country. The Queen was greeted by the world's first transsexual member of parliament instead.

4. The first name of the Queen Mother, the mother of Queen Elizabeth II, was Elizabeth.

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 10 February 2012

Answers to last week's questions on shoes:

1. Australia's most famous shoes are probably the shoe lost by Evdokia Petrov during a scuffle at Sydney Airport, the shoes thrown at John Howard on the ABC TV program Q&A and the shoe lost by Julia Gillard during a security scare in Canberra last month. (Sydney Morning Herald)

2. Imelda Marcos, wife of former Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos, owned 3000 pairs of shoes.

3. Things that you can wear on your feet beginning with 's' are sandals, scuffs, shoes, skates, skis, slippers, sneakers, snowshoes, socks, stilts and stockings.

4. The official school footwear on Lord Howe Island is bare feet.

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 3 February 2012

Answers to last week's questions on photography:

1. Kodak attained 90 per cent of U.S. photographic film sales with its Kodachrome product.

2. Kodak's bankruptcy was caused by the digital camera era. The company that produced the first digital camera was Kodak.

3. Whose death did legendary Australian cameraman Neil Davis capture on film in 1985 when he was covering an attempted coup in Bangkok? His own. (Sydney Daily Telegraph)

4. Five security cameras at 363 George Street, Sydney, caught a thief in the act of committing his offences on 28 and 29 November 2000. He was stealing the security cameras. (Sydney Daily Telegraph)

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 27 January 2012

Answers to last week's questions on the Australian of the Year award:

1. No-one has won the Australian of the Year award twice.

2. There was no 1993 Australian of the Year because the dating system was changed.

3. The only brothers to have both been Australian of the Year are Galarrwuy Yunupingu and Mandawuy Yunupingu

4. One out of four Australians of the Year have been sports champions.

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 20 January 2012

Answers to last week's questions on India:

1. Both Australia and India celebrate a national holiday on January 26.

2. The Indian flag has a wheel.

3. In India, playing cards are round.

4. All-India Radio broadcast funeral music and schools and shops were closed on 22 March 1979 when Indian prime minister Morarji Desai informed parliament that Jayaprakash Narayan, patriot and elder statesman, had died. Who was most surprised by the tributes? Mr Narayan, who was convalescing in a Bombay hospital (Book of Heroic Failures)

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 13 January 2012

Answers to last week's questions on the Samoan dateline change:

1. When Samoa dropped 30 December from its calendar last month by moving to west of the dateline, what was Saturday became Sunday for them. While most Seventh-day Adventists (Saturday observers everywhere else) decided to have Sunday as their sacred day to retain their seven-day cycle, some switched to the new Saturday.

2. The only known Jew in Samoa decided to light his candles on Saturday night in future. The advice from rabbis is 'Don't go to Samoa then you don't have a problem.'

3. Flights between Samoa and the nearby tiny country Tokelau have not been affected because there aren't any. Tokelau has no airport.

4. American Samoa has remained on the eastern side of the dateline.

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Free Trivia Answers to Questions for week ending 6 January 2012

Answers to last week's questions on changing light globes:

1. How many hands does it take to change a light globe?
Many, as in many hands make light work

2. How many pedants does it take to change a light globe?
None. Pedants don't change them, they replace them.

3. How many orthodox rabbis does it take to change a light globe?
What's change?

4. How many Amish does it take to change a light globe?
What's a light globe?

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Trivia Collection

Trivia questions are at Free Trivia Questions 2004 and at Free Trivia Questions 2005 and at Free Trivia Questions 2006 and at Free Trivia Questions 2007 and at Free Trivia Questions 2008 and at Free Trivia Questions 2009 and at Free Trivia Questions 2010 and at Free Trivia Questions 2011 and at Free Trivia Questions 2012

Free answers to the trivia questions are at Free Trivia Answers 2004 and at Free Trivia Answers 2005 and at Free Trivia Answers 2006 and at Free Trivia Answers 2007 and at Free Trivia Answers 2008 and at Free Trivia Answers 2009 and at Free Trivia Answers 2010 and at Free Trivia Answers 2011 and at Free Trivia Answers 2012

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