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 6 of 6
Where the world's sports came from, and how their rules got written down.
Basketball was invented in 1891 by a teacher looking for what?
Distances, dimensions and durations that are fixed by rule across every sport.
How high is a basketball hoop in professional play?
The driest, coldest, highest and most remote places, and what makes them that way.
What is the largest desert on Earth?
Countries inside countries, straight lines drawn badly, and territory nobody claims.
Which country is entirely surrounded by South Africa?
The journeys animals make, and how they navigate without any of our instruments.
Which bird makes the longest annual migration of any animal?
Which animals we tamed, roughly when, and why so few of them worked.
Which animal is generally accepted as the first domesticated by humans?
How astronomers actually see things, and why some telescopes sit in space or underground.
A refracting telescope gathers light using what?
Why orbiting is falling, what escape velocity means, and how spacecraft actually travel.
An object in orbit is best described as doing what?
The sitar, the koto, the djembe and the bagpipes — instruments beyond the orchestra.
The sitar is most closely associated with which country?
Why languages drift apart, how new ones form, and what happens when the last speaker dies.
A pidgin is best described as what?
Where the familiar stories came from, and how much the versions we know were changed.
The Brothers Grimm are best described as what?
The literature, oratory and vocabulary the classical world handed to everyone since.
The Iliad and the Odyssey are attributed to whom?
Enigma, Bletchley, deception operations and the intelligence war behind the fighting.
The Enigma machine was used principally by which country?
Hypotheses, controls, peer review and the difference between a theory and a guess.
In science, a "theory" means what?
Salting, smoking, canning and freezing — and why each of them works.
Salting preserves food principally by doing what?
Cartilage instead of bone, electrical senses, and the fish that break every rule.
Sharks and rays differ from most fish because their skeletons are made of what?
The national film industries and movements that shaped the medium elsewhere.
Which country produces the most feature films per year?
Why the sky is blue, why ice floats, and other things everyone has heard explained once.
Why does the sky appear blue?
Why a curveball curves, why records fall, and what altitude does to a race.
A spinning ball curves in flight because of what?
Metros, buses, traffic and the counterintuitive rules of urban transport.
Which city opened the world's first underground railway?