Pick a subject, choose your level, and dive in. Each quiz is written and fact-checked by hand, with an explanation after every answer.
260 quizzes · page 4 of 6
Grids, boulevards, green belts and new capitals: the cities that were designed rather than grown.
Which official rebuilt Paris in the nineteenth century with wide boulevards cut through the…
Darts, bias, selvedge and interfacing — how flat cloth is turned into something that fits.
Cutting fabric on the bias means cutting at what angle to the grain?
Corsets to punk: the shapes, fastenings and fabrics that reset what people wore.
Which garment did women's dress largely abandon around the First World War?
Panels, gutters, balloons and splash pages: how comics tell a story on a flat page.
In a comic, what is the gutter?
Cels, twos, squash and stretch: the working methods behind moving drawings.
In traditional animation, what is a cel?
Ten investigations that ended careers, rewrote laws or forced institutions to open their files.
Which newspaper's reporting on the Watergate break-in led to President Nixon's resignation?
Embargoes, attribution, corrections and the difference between on the record and on background.
If a source speaks "on background", what has usually been agreed?
Founders' initials, invented words and a Danish phrase: the origins behind ten familiar names.
The name Adidas comes from what?
Think Small, the USP, AIDA and the account planner: how advertising is built and argued about.
Which car was advertised in the 1960s under the headline "Think Small"?
Limited liability, subsidiaries, cooperatives and due diligence — how businesses are actually structured.
What does limited liability mean for a company's shareholders?
Balance sheets, depreciation, break-even and goodwill: what a set of company accounts is actually saying.
The balance sheet equation states that assets are equal to what?
Opportunity cost, externalities, elasticity and moral hazard — the concepts behind the arguments.
Opportunity cost is best described as what?
Fiat currency, Bretton Woods, legal tender and lenders of last resort: the plumbing behind money.
The phrase "double coincidence of wants" describes a problem with what?
What separates a mineral from a rock, and where a gemstone gets its colour.
What must a substance have to be classified as a mineral?
Ice, rivers, wind and waves, and the landforms each of them leaves behind.
What is the difference between weathering and erosion?
Bioluminescence, vent communities and the slow economy of a world without sunlight.
Which name is given to the ocean layer below roughly 1,000 metres, where sunlight never…
Whales, seals, sirenians and otters, and the equipment each one needed to leave the land.
Baleen whales feed by doing what?
Brood patches, egg tricks and the birds that hand the whole job to one parent.
A bird that hatches covered in down and able to walk almost at once is described as what?
Ten bills, tongues and stomachs, and the food each of them evolved to handle.
A flamingo feeds by doing what?
Mulch, pH, grafting and hardening off — the reasoning behind the repeated jobs.
What does mulching a bed with bark or compost mainly achieve?
Rings, heartwood, fungal partners and the physics of lifting water thirty metres.
What do the rings visible in a cut tree trunk record?
The scales, indices and warning systems behind the numbers in a disaster headline.
The Saffir-Simpson scale rates hurricanes on the basis of what?
Ten catastrophes and the laws, defences and sciences built in their aftermath.
The great earthquake of 1755 that destroyed most of a European capital and helped launch the…
Rock, ocean, air and living tissue, and the flows of carbon that connect them.
Which pair of processes moves the largest amounts of carbon between the atmosphere and living…
Red Lists, treaties, corridors and reserves — the practical machinery of protection.
What does the IUCN Red List do?
Walls, wars, philosophy and collapse, told through the men who held the purple.
Which emperor ordered a wall built across northern Britain in the 120s AD?
The conquests, the successor kingdoms and the three centuries of Greek influence that followed.
Alexander the Great inherited the throne of which kingdom?
Vaults and buttresses, monastic rules, pilgrim roads and the arguments that split the church.
Which feature allowed Gothic cathedrals to carry the outward thrust of the roof away from the…
Mali gold, Song printing, Mongol cavalry and the stone walls of Great Zimbabwe.
Mansa Musa, whose pilgrimage to Mecca in the 1320s became famous, ruled which empire?
No man's land, duckboards, gas and the daily conditions of the Western Front.
In trench warfare, what was no man's land?
Reparations, ruined currencies, new borders and the institutions built out of the wreckage.
Which body was created after the First World War to prevent future conflicts between states?
Five monarchs, one break with Rome and 118 years that reshaped England.
The Tudor dynasty began when Henry Tudor won which battle in 1485?
Regents, consorts, orbs and the rules that decide who gets the throne next.
Primogeniture is a rule under which the throne passes to whom?
Minarets, arks, stupas and naves — the parts of religious buildings and what they are for.
The tower attached to a mosque, from which the call to prayer is traditionally given, is…
Fasts, feasts and pilgrimages, and why some dates move while others stay put.
Eid al-Fitr marks the end of what?
Ten long poems from Mesopotamia to Mali, and the places and languages that produced them.
The Epic of Gilgamesh was written down in which region?
Coyote, Reynard, the Monkey King and the other figures who win by cunning rather than strength.
Which Norse figure is a trickster, sometimes helping the gods and sometimes working against…
Mens rea, tort, hearsay and the other terms that do the heavy lifting in a courtroom.
In criminal law, what does mens rea refer to?
Codes, charters, conventions and the trials that made individuals answerable for state crimes.
In which year was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted?
Actuators, end effectors and the awkward business of staying upright.
In robotics, an actuator is the part that does what?
Two centuries of arguments about whether a machine could think, and what happened when people tried.
Who is usually credited with publishing the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a…
Phishing, second factors, ransomware and why length beats punctuation in a password.
Phishing is best described as what?
Packets, CERN, HTML and the browser that turned a physics tool into a mass medium.
Packet switching, the idea underneath the internet, works by doing what?
Steel, rubber, glass and silicon — the substances that set the limits of what could be built.
The Bessemer process, introduced in the 1850s, made which material cheap for the first time?
Containers, barcodes, lift brakes and drain traps — modest devices with outsized effects.
The standard shipping container mattered chiefly because it did what?
Lift, ailerons, turbofans, holding patterns and why the black box is orange.
An aircraft wing generates lift chiefly by doing what?
Loading marks, draught, tonnage and the vocabulary of the merchant fleet.
On a ship, what do "port" and "starboard" refer to?
Ships crushed in ice, disputed claims, and the people whose names were left off the reports.
Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance was lost in 1915 in what way?