Kylie’s feats, Italian sweets and a lost TV presenter – take the Thursday quiz

Thursday seems to come around earlier every week, especially if you’ve set yourself an immovable deadline for writing 15 questions about general knowledge and topical news stories. All your favourites are here: Kate Bush, Ron from Sparks, the Olly Murs face masks, and the unexpected anagram round. It is just for fun, there are no prizes, but there are bonus points to be had in the comments for making the quiz master laugh or spotting the hidden Doctor Who reference in this week’s questions. Let us know how you get on!

The Thursday quiz, No 28

1. CRYPTO WOE: The creators of a TV programme-themed cryptocurrency launched on 20 October could have made off with as much as $2.1m after the token’s crash. What show was it based on?

   1. Game of Thrones

   2. Squid Game

   3. Breaking Bad

   4. Takeshi's Castle

2. WE COME FROM THE LAND OF THE ICE AND SNOW: Scientists have claimed that the Azores in the Atlantic were settled first not by sailors from Portugal, as long believed, but by Vikings. Which animal did they bring with them that carried a tell-tale genetic sign?

   1. Cats

   2. Dogs

   3. Chickens

   4. Mice

3. NEVER TURN YOUR BACK ON MOTHER EARTH: That's a 1974 song by Sparks that warns us never to be tempted by her favours. But that's not important right now. Why have people been warned about beaches in Cumbria this week?

   1. A colony of seals has been aggressively defending their territory and one has bitten a child

   2. Plants that look and smell like parsnips but are highly poisonous have washed ashore

   3. A container has spilled, littering the beaches with Olly Murs face masks among other toxic waste

   4. Some of them have been closed as a Cop26 security precaution, even though the conference is being held over 175 miles away in Glasgow

4. COMPARATIVELY SPEAKING: Which of these absolute bangers by goddess of pop Kylie Minogue came out first?

   1. Shocked

   2. Spinning Around

   3. Confide in Me

   4. Breathe

5. GEOGRAPHICAL IDIOCY: CNN’s Wolf Blitzer sparked much hilarity with a tweet that he was covering Glasgow's Cop26 conference from which Scottish location? Plot twist – it is time for the angrams

   1. Inbred hug

   2. Nerviness

   3. Heaven snot

   4. Owl trim fail

6. POETRY CORNER: John Donne was considered one of the finest English poets of his age. Where was he born?

   1. Bristol

   2. Bath

   3. Wells

   4. London

7. GCSE SCIENCE CORNER: Is Calcium a metal?

   1. Yes

   2. No

8. MAMMA MIA: Ado Campeol died aged 93 at his home in Treviso at the weekend. He is widely – though perhaps not definitively – credited with inventing which Italian dessert dish in 1972?

   1. Torrone

   2. Tersurus

   3. Tiramisu

   4. Taralli

9. ON THIS DAY: It was on 4 November 1960 that Dr Jane Goodall made the first-ever scientific observation of the use of tools by a non-human animal. In which species?

   1. Chimpanzee

   2. Octopus

   3. Gorilla

   4. Crow

10. MUSIC: Which of these guilty pleasures from the quiz master's office playlist narrowly missed out on a top 10 cinema box office placing last week after their anniversary concert was shown in theatres in the UK?

    1. David Essex

    2. Gary Numan

    3. Cliff Richard

    4. Kate Bush

11. SPORT: It seems that after the notorious horse-punching incident at the Tokyo Olympics, modern pentathlon is set to replace horse-riding with which discipline to go alongside fencing, swimming, shooting and running?

    1. Weightlifting

    2. Rowing

    3. Cycling

    4. Snooker

12. GOING IT ALONE: The city of Kingston upon Hull is the only city in England that has its own unique company and network for what, separate from the rest of England?

    1. Telecoms

    2. Electricity grid

    3. Postal service

    4. Ice cream vans

13. WEIRD CLAIMS TO FAME: The George Hotel in Kingston upon Hull has a plaque on it claiming which unique achievement?

    1. It has the smallest toilets in England

    2. It has the smallest window in England

    3. It has the smallest pub bar in England

    4. It once announced that it had started a European Super League and then had to back down a couple of days later

14. TINTINOLOGY: Which of these, according to definitive source "The Tinitin wiki", is not an oath uttered by Captain Haddock in the Tintin books?

    1. Gibbering anthropoids!

    2. Great galloping gophers!

    3. Guano gatherer!

    4. Golbat's bazookas!

15. ENSEMBLE CAST: And finally, you interplanetary pirates, as Captain Haddock would say, try this. René Auberjonois, Colm Meaney and Alexander Siddig were regular cast members on which Star Trek show?

    1. Star Trek: The Next Generation

    2. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

    3. Star Trek: Voyager

    4. Enterprise, the one with Scott Bakula that we all pretend never happened

Solutions

1:B - Yes, the idea was that the cryptocurrency would be a pay-to-play token to play an online game, loads of people piled in, the value went up to $2,856, and then the token’s website and social accounts disappeared, along with a white paper describing Squid. This was the one thing investors didn't want to happen., 2:D - Genetic evidence that mice on the Azores carry a distinct signature found where Vikings settled boosted by archaeological evidence of settlement between AD700 and 850 has led scientists to conclude that the Azores were first settled by people from the north of Europe, rather than the south., 3:B - Coastguards have warned people to avoid the plants called hemlock water dropwort (Oenanthe crocata), which is also known as dead man’s fingers. Even a small portion can prove fatal to humans by attacking the nervous system, and is also fatal to animals. You can tell by his face that Ron from Sparks thinks you should have known that., 4:A - Shocked came out as a single in 1991 and reached No 7 in the UK single charts. Produced by Stock Aitken Waterman, it was one of a string of singles from her third album Rhythm of Love, which very much distanced her from the "girl next door" image that had been cultivated for her on her earlier releases. Thank goodness. Confide in Me came out in 1994, Breathe in 1998, and Spinning Around in 2000. , 5:A - Yes "Inbred hug" is Edinburgh, and Glaswegians are welcome to insert their own punchline there. Your other options were Inverness (Nerviness), Stonehaven (Heaven snot) and Fort William (Owl trim fail). Blitzer's tweet said "I’m now reporting from Edinburgh in Scotland where 20,000 world leaders and delegates have gathered for the COP26 Climate Summit" and could have definitely done with some commas or a slight rephrasing. I wager that if he'd ever had to deal with pedantic comments under a quiz, he'd have been in a better shape to write it unambiguously., 6:D - Donne was born in London in 1572. He went on to be made Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London for the last 10 years of his life., 7:A - It is a metal. "Discovered" by Humphry Davy in 1808, calcium is a silvery-white, soft metal that tarnishes rapidly in air and reacts with water. So you all laughed at Jaws in the James Bond movies with his metal teeth, but how do you feel now? , 8:C - Almost as old as the quiz master himself, the delicious concoction featuring egg yolks whipped with mascarpone cheese, layered over coffee-soaked biscuits and topped with bitter cocoa powder was added to the family restaurant’s menu in 1972. , 9:A - All of the animals in the answer options have been observed to use tools, but Goodall's observation was at Kasakela chimpanzee community, where she saw a chimpanzee that she had named David Greybeard using a grass stalk as a tool to extract termites from a termite hill. The chimpanzees in the community also purposefully stripped the leaves off twigs to utilise them as tools., 10:C - It was Cliff Richard, whose 80th birthday concert was released in cinemas last week finished 11th in the box office charts, ahead of the opening week takings of big name horror movie Antlers, which must be somewhat mortifying for them. It isn't known if the pantomime horse in the picture also appeared with Cliff at the show. , 11:C - German coach Kim Raisner was sent home from Tokyo for cruelty to the horse Saint Boy after punching it for refusing to jump for competitor Annika Schleu, who had been in the gold-medal position. The five disciplines in the modern pentathlon were assembled in the early 20th century to represent the skills that an infantry soldier would need. Competitors will, it seems, in future have to jump on their bikes rather than commandeer a randomly assigned horse which may or may not want to actually take part in the Olympics. , 12:A - Kingston upon Hull is the only city in England with its own independent telephone network company. It has distinctive cream telephone boxes and even still produces its own "white pages" telephone directory., 13:B - There's a plaque next to a tiny slit in the wall, claiming that it is a window that employees back in the day peered through to see if any stage coaches were arriving down Land of Green Ginger, the street where it is located., 14:D - Golbat is a Pokémon. The Tintin wiki says that Hergé developed this trait of Captain Haddock's because at the time he was writing censorship was strict, and he "recalled an incident from 1933 in which a trader used the term 'Four Power Pact' in an offensive manner, which inspired him to employ officially non-offensive terms like swear words"., 15:B - Of course it wasn't Enterprise. As if that series ever happened. You may have been thrown by the presence of Colm Meaney in the list, because he also appeared in Star Trek: The Next Generation and has been in 225 Star Trek episodes overall, but Deep Space Nine was the series that teamed him up with the much-missed René Auberjonois's Odo and Alexander Siddig's Julian Bashir.

Scores

1. 0 and above.

   We hope you had fun – let us know how you got on in the comments!

2. 3 and above.

   We hope you had fun – let us know how you got on in the comments!

• If you do think there has been an egregious error in one of the questions or answers, please feel free to email martin.belam@theguardian.com but remember, the quiz master’s word is always final, especially about the respective merits of various Star Trek series.