50 Fun Facts About Academic Team Questions

Which planet is the hottest in the solar system and spins backwards compared with most others?

Venus is hotter than Mercury even though it sits nearly twice as far from the Sun, because its thick atmosphere traps the heat. Its surface averages about 464 °C.

Which city was built as Australia's capital after Sydney and Melbourne each fought to be chosen?

Canberra was a compromise between the two rivals, and the deal required the new capital to sit at least 100 miles from Sydney. Melbourne hosted the government while it was built.

Which American author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer took a pen name from a riverboat depth call?

Mark Twain was the leadsman's cry for a river depth of two fathoms, safe water for a steamboat. Samuel Clemens learned it while working as a steamboat pilot.

Which Warsaw-born scientist is the only person with Nobel Prizes in two different sciences?

Marie Curie won in physics and then in chemistry, and named the element polonium after her homeland Poland while it was still partitioned among three empires.

Which river rises in Montana, crosses the Great Plains and joins the Mississippi near St. Louis?

The Missouri flows 2,341 miles from the Rocky Mountains, and joined to the lower Mississippi it forms the fourth-longest river system in the world.

Which composer was almost completely deaf when his Ninth Symphony and its 'Ode to Joy' premiered?

Ludwig van Beethoven was still conducting, several bars off, when the contralto Caroline Unger gently turned him around to accept the audience's cheers.

At which Civil War battlefield did Abraham Lincoln give a speech of about 270 words in 1863?

Gettysburg heard Lincoln speak for about two minutes, after the main speaker, Edward Everett, had talked for two hours and 13,607 words.

Which ancient Greek thinker gives his name to the theorem a² + b² = c² for right-angled triangles?

Pythagoras got the credit, but Babylonian scribes were using the same rule more than a thousand years before he was born.

Which gas makes up about 78 percent of the air in Earth's atmosphere, far more than any other?

Nitrogen dominates dry air, with oxygen second at about 21 percent. Third place goes to argon at nearly 1 percent, far ahead of carbon dioxide.

Which continent do both the equator and the prime meridian cross, placing it in all four hemispheres?

Africa straddles both lines, which cross each other out at sea in the Gulf of Guinea, about 600 kilometers off the West African coast.

Which cell part, nicknamed the powerhouse, has its own DNA that usually comes from the mother?

Mitochondria are thought to descend from free-living bacteria that fused with larger cells long ago, which is why their genome still resembles a bacterial one.

Which metal has the chemical symbol Au, taken from its Latin name aurum?

Gold is the most malleable metal of all. A single gram of it can be beaten into a sheet covering one square meter.

Which scientist's 1687 book Principia stated that every action has an equal and opposite reaction?

Isaac Newton listed it as the third of his three laws of motion. The first says a body stays at rest or in steady straight-line motion unless a force acts on it.

Which naturalist devised the theory of natural selection after a five-year voyage aboard HMS Beagle?

Charles Darwin was still writing up the idea twenty years later when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay describing the same thing, pushing both men to go public together.

Which bone, the only one in the thigh, is the longest in the human body?

The femur runs from the hip joint down to the knee, and in humans it is also the thickest bone in the body.

Which chemist published a periodic table in 1869 and predicted three elements nobody had found yet?

Dmitri Mendeleev was proved right in 1875, when a French chemist who knew nothing of the prediction discovered gallium, one of the three.

Which chemist's team in London took Photo 51, the X-ray image that revealed DNA's double helix?

Rosalind Franklin's student Raymond Gosling took the picture, and a colleague showed it to James Watson without her permission.

Which layer of Earth's atmosphere, the lowest of them all, is where most weather takes place?

The troposphere takes its name from the Greek tropos, a turn or change, which suits a layer whose air is always mixing. It holds about 80 percent of the atmosphere's mass.

Which subatomic particle did J. J. Thomson discover in 1897 during experiments with cathode rays?

The electron was called a 'corpuscle' by Thomson himself, but later scientists preferred a name that George Johnstone Stoney had suggested six years earlier.

Which scientist's name is attached to 6.022 × 10²³, the number of particles in one mole?

Amedeo Avogadro never knew the figure himself. The physicist Jean Perrin coined the name in 1909, more than fifty years after the Italian's death.

Which Greek letter names the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, about 3.14159?

Pi is an irrational number, so its decimal digits never end and never settle into a repeating pattern. Fractions such as 22/7 only come close.

What is the longest side of a right triangle called, the one lying opposite the 90-degree angle?

The hypotenuse gets its name from a Greek word meaning 'stretching under', because it stretches under the right angle.

Which medieval mathematician's sequence runs 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, each number the sum of the two before?

Fibonacci introduced the sequence through a puzzle about breeding rabbits in his 1202 book, which also helped bring Hindu-Arabic numerals to Europe.

Which branch of math takes its name from the title of a ninth-century book by al-Khwarizmi?

Algebra comes from the Arabic al-jabr, a word that originally described setting broken bones. Al-Khwarizmi borrowed it for his method of rearranging equations.

Which Greek mathematician wrote the Elements, often called the most successful textbook ever?

Euclid rested every proof in the book on just ten starting assumptions, and it has stayed in use for introductory geometry ever since.

Which term names the result of a division problem, such as the 4 you get when 12 is divided by 3?

Quotient comes from the Latin quotiens, meaning 'how many times', since dividing asks how many times one number fits into another.

Which number system, built from only the digits 0 and 1, do almost all modern computers use?

Binary suits electronics because each digit can be a circuit that is simply on or off. Gottfried Leibniz is credited with the modern system, long before computers existed.

Which astronomer's 1543 book put the Sun rather than Earth at the center of the known universe?

Nicolaus Copernicus saw his model into print just before he died, and it set off a revolution in science that still carries his name.

Which South American river carries more water to the sea than the next seven largest combined?

The Amazon supplies about a fifth of all the river water flowing into the world's oceans, and two of its own tributaries rank among the ten largest rivers by flow.

Which London district gives its name to the meridian of zero degrees longitude and a time standard?

Greenwich was picked as the world's starting line for longitude at an 1884 conference in Washington. Since 1999 its observatory has traced the line across the night sky with a green laser.

Which Shakespeare tragedy follows two lovers from Verona's feuding Montague and Capulet families?

Romeo and Juliet was not an original plot. Shakespeare reworked an Italian tale that an English poet had already turned into verse in 1562.

Which part of speech describes a noun, as the word 'red' does in the phrase 'a red balloon'?

An adjective was once counted as a type of noun. Latin and Greek grammarians lumped the two together because both changed their endings in the same way.

Which figure of speech compares two things using 'like' or 'as', for example 'as brave as a lion'?

A simile spells the comparison out, while a metaphor skips the linking word and simply says that one thing is another.

Which short poem follows a five, seven, five pattern and traditionally includes a seasonal word?

Haiku began as the opening verse of a longer linked poem, and only over time came to be written as a stand-alone piece.

Which ancient Greek poet is traditionally credited with both the Iliad and the Odyssey?

Homer was pictured in ancient times as a blind bard from Ionia, but modern scholars doubt that a single author composed both poems.

Which author based To Kill a Mockingbird on her family and neighbors in Monroeville, Alabama?

Harper Lee grew up playing with Truman Capote, who spent childhood summers in Monroeville, and she later helped him research In Cold Blood.

Which Gothic novel, subtitled The Modern Prometheus, did Mary Shelley start writing at only 18?

Frankenstein first appeared anonymously in 1818, and Mary Shelley's name was not printed on it until a French translation came out three years later.

Which term describes a word that reads the same backward and forward, such as 'racecar' or 'madam'?

A palindrome can be a whole sentence too. 'A man, a plan, a canal – Panama' reads the same in both directions once the spaces and punctuation are ignored.

Which Russian novelist wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, yet never won a Nobel Prize?

Leo Tolstoy was nominated for the literature prize every year from 1902 to 1906 and still went without, an omission that remains a famous controversy.

Which carved slab, found by a French officer in Egypt in 1799, became the key to reading hieroglyphs?

The Rosetta Stone repeats one decree in three versions, and because scholars could already read the Ancient Greek one, it unlocked the two Egyptian scripts.

Which Founding Father drafted the Declaration of Independence and later became the third president?

Thomas Jefferson did the writing largely alone, and he died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of its adoption.

Which amendment to the US Constitution protects freedom of speech, religion, the press and assembly?

The First Amendment was third on the original list of twelve sent to the states. It moved up because the two ahead of it were not ratified at the time.

Which document did King John of England seal at Runnymede in 1215, accepting limits on royal power?

Magna Carta failed at first, since neither side kept its word and the Pope annulled it. Later kings reissued it, and three of its clauses remain law in England.

Which civilization built the mountain citadel of Machu Picchu high in the Andes of what is now Peru?

The Inca built it around 1450, probably as an estate for the emperor Pachacuti, and abandoned it roughly a century later.

Which 1803 Supreme Court case established judicial review, the power of courts to strike down laws?

Marbury v. Madison began over a judge's commission that was never delivered. The Court struck down the law that let it hear the case, so William Marbury never got the job.

Which Scottish economist wrote of an 'invisible hand' in his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations?

Adam Smith mentioned the 'invisible hand' only once in the whole book, yet it grew into one of its most frequently quoted ideas.

Which Portuguese explorer led the first voyage around the world but died in the Philippines?

Ferdinand Magellan sailed for Spain, not Portugal, and it was the Spanish navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano who brought the surviving crew home in 1522.

Which French thinker's 1748 book The Spirit of Law set out the idea of separating government powers?

Montesquieu saw the Catholic Church ban the book in 1751, yet America's founders leaned on it when they drafted the US Constitution.

Which Renaissance artist carved the marble David and painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?

Michelangelo saw himself as a sculptor and was reluctant to paint the ceiling, even suggesting that his young rival Raphael take the job instead.

Which empire, ruled from Constantinople, ended when Ottoman forces captured the city in 1453?

The Byzantine Empire never went by that name in its own day. Its citizens called themselves Romans, and the label was coined only after it had fallen.