Pick a subject, choose your level, and dive in. Each quiz is written and fact-checked by hand, with an explanation after every answer.
236 quizzes · page 8 of 10
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?
Inland journeys, the guides who made them possible, and the names that were already there.
The first descent of the Amazon by a European party, in 1541 and 1542, was led by whom?
Grid references, bearings, declination and what the spacing of contour lines is telling you.
On a hillside, what does the spacing between contour lines tell you?