46 Fun Facts About Fill in the Blank

Which city fills the blank: 'The capital of Australia is ____'?

Canberra was chosen under a constitutional rule that the capital sit in New South Wales at least 100 miles from Sydney, and Parliament met in Melbourne until moving there in 1927.

Which sea fills the blank: 'The River Danube empties into the ____'?

Black Sea; communist Romania made political prisoners dig a canal linking the Danube to it in the early 1950s, and the project became known as the Canal of Death.

Which country fills the blank: 'Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest peak, stands in ____'?

Tanzania; the German Hans Meyer named the summit Kaiser-Wilhelm-Spitze after his emperor, but it has since been renamed Uhuru Peak, Swahili for Freedom Peak.

Which country fills the blank: 'The world's smallest sovereign state by area is ____'?

Vatican City became a sovereign state only in 1929, when the Lateran Pacts with Mussolini's Italy ended a 60-year standoff that began when Italy seized the Papal States.

Which country fills the blank: 'The Strait of Gibraltar separates Spain from ____'?

Morocco lies across the strait from Spain; Gibraltar's name comes from Jabal Tariq, the mountain of Tariq, the commander who crossed from Africa to invade Iberia.

Which name fills the blank: 'Magna Carta was sealed in 1215 by King ____ of England'?

John sealed Magna Carta to make peace with his rebel barons, but the charter failed and civil war broke out within three months.

Which word fills the blank: 'Asked when East Germany's new border rules took effect, Günter Schabowski said: effective ____'?

Immediately, he said after a pause, and that night crowds mobbed the Berlin Wall's checkpoints until, within hours, border guards let them through.

Which word fills the blank: 'The Great Fire of London started on ____ Lane'?

Pudding Lane was where the fire broke out on Thomas Farriner's premises, yet a French watchmaker, Robert Hubert, confessed to starting it and was hanged at Tyburn.

Which word fills the blank: 'The Treaty of Versailles was signed in the palace's Hall of ____'?

Mirrors; Bismarck had proclaimed the German Empire in that hall in 1871, so France, bent on avenging that defeat, had Germany sign the 1919 peace there.

Which country fills the blank: 'The ancient city of Carthage stood in what is now ____'?

Tunisia; Rome burned Carthage to the ground in 146 BC, then rebuilt it a century later as the leading Roman city of its African province.

Which symbol fills the blank: 'The chemical symbol for gold is ____'?

Au, from the Latin aurum; gold lies pure as nuggets in stream beds, which is why it was among the first metals people worked.

Which mineral fills the blank: 'On the Mohs scale, the hardest natural material is ____'?

Diamond is so hard that the toughest ones can be scratched only by other diamonds, yet graphite, made of the same pure carbon, is soft enough for pencils.

Which organelle fills the blank: 'The powerhouse of the cell is the ____'?

Mitochondrion; it carries its own DNA, passed down from mothers, so scientists use it to trace ancestry along the maternal line.

Which word fills the blank: 'The bones of the middle ear are the malleus, the incus and the ____'?

Stapes, Latin for stirrup, passes vibrations into the inner ear, so when abnormal bone growth leaves it stuck in place, hearing becomes impaired.

Which unit fills the blank: 'The SI unit of electric current is the ____'?

Ampere honours André-Marie Ampère, who showed that two parallel wires carrying current attract or repel each other, depending on which way the currents flow.

Which city fills the blank: 'The 2016 Summer Olympics were held in ____'?

Rio de Janeiro's Games included Yusra Mardini, a Syrian refugee who a year earlier had swum for hours beside a sinking dinghy to reach Greece, competing under the Olympic flag.

Which word fills the blank: 'In tennis, a score of zero is called ____'?

Love, as a score, probably comes from playing for love, meaning playing for nothing, with no stakes riding on the game.

Which word fills the blank: 'The 1908 Olympic marathon began at ____ Castle'?

Windsor Castle was the start and the royal box the finish, and that course's odd 26 miles 385 yards became the marathon standard in 1921.

Which league fills the blank: 'The Stanley Cup is awarded each year to the playoff champion of the ____'?

NHL champions each get a day with the Stanley Cup, and after the New York Rangers won in 1994, Kentucky Derby winner Go for Gin stuck his head in it to eat.

Which colour fills the blank: 'The overall leader of the Tour de France wears a ____ jersey'?

Yellow; Eugène Christophe, officially its first wearer, led that post-war Tour by nearly half an hour until his fork broke on the penultimate stage and he lost.

Which name fills the blank: 'The 1997 epic historical romance Titanic was written and directed by ____'?

James Cameron gave up his $8 million directing fee and his share of the initial profits as Titanic's budget ballooned toward $200 million.

Which name fills the blank: 'In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy's dog is named ____'?

Toto exposes the Wizard as a humbug in both versions: in Baum's book he tips over a screen, and in the 1939 film he pulls back a curtain.

Which name fills the blank: 'Black Panther rules the fictional African nation of ____'?

Wakanda hides its vibranium-powered technology by posing as a poor, undeveloped nation, until in the 2018 film T'Challa reveals the truth at the United Nations.

Which name fills the blank: 'The Godfather was adapted from a 1969 novel by ____'?

Mario Puzo wrote it for the money while in debt, working from research rather than any personal experience of the Mafia.

Which name fills the blank: 'The Simpsons live in the town of ____'?

Springfield came from the town in the sitcom Father Knows Best, and Matt Groening liked that it was so common a US city name that everyone would think it was their Springfield.

Which city fills the blank: 'The Beatles formed in the English city of ____'?

Liverpool record-shop manager Brian Epstein stuck with the Beatles as label after label turned them down, until EMI's Parlophone signed them.

Which word fills the blank: 'The choral finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is known as the Ode to ____'?

Joy became Freedom when Leonard Bernstein conducted the Ninth in Berlin after the Wall fell in 1989, swapping Schiller's word Freude for Freiheit.

Which word fills the blank: 'Pianoforte comes from Italian for soft and ____'?

Loud; pianoforte shortens an Italian name meaning harpsichord with soft and loud, because unlike the harpsichord it could vary its volume with the player's touch.

Which island fills the blank: 'Bob Marley was born in the village of Nine Mile on ____'?

Jamaica's Smile Jamaica concert, meant to calm political violence, went ahead with Bob Marley on stage two days after gunmen shot him at his Kingston home.

Which name fills the blank: 'The dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was written by ____'?

George Orwell finished it on the remote Scottish island of Jura while battling tuberculosis, and he died in January 1950, months after it came out.

Which word fills the blank: 'Bilbo Baggins lives in a hobbit-hole called Bag ____'?

End, as in Bag End: Bilbo came home from his adventure to find he had been presumed dead and his belongings up for auction.

Which word fills the blank: 'Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B ____ Street'?

Baker Street's Abbey National building society got so many letters addressed to Sherlock Holmes that it employed a full-time secretary to answer them.

Which word fills the blank in the opening of Pride and Prejudice: 'It is a truth universally ____'?

Acknowledged: the line says a rich single man must want a wife, and the next adds that local families already see a newcomer as the rightful property of one of their daughters.

Which name fills the blank: 'Don Quixote was written by ____'?

Miguel de Cervantes was beaten to his own sequel by a fake Part Two in 1614, so in his real one Don Quixote refuses to set foot in Zaragoza, where the impostor had gone for the jousts.

Which word fills the blank: 'Sushi rice is seasoned with ____'?

Vinegar lets cooks make sushi to eat at once; the earliest sushi was fish left in fermenting rice for months, and that rice was thrown away.

Which fruit fills the blank: 'Guacamole is a dip based on ____'?

Avocado history turned on one tree: postman Rudolph Hass planned to cut his seedling down after grafts failed, yet it was spared, and every Hass avocado descends from it.

Which flower fills the blank: 'The spice saffron comes from the red stigmas of a ____'?

Crocus stigmas must be separated from each flower by hand, and those laborious hours, about 150 flowers per gram, are what make saffron so expensive.

Which word fills the blank: 'Tofu is made by pressing the curds of coagulated ____ milk'?

Soy milk curdles into tofu, and Benjamin Franklin, curious about this Chinese bean cheese, asked a merchant who had lived in China how it was made and mailed his answer to John Bartram in 1770.

Which word fills the blank: 'Hummus is a Levantine dip made from cooked, mashed ____ blended with tahini, lemon juice and garlic'?

Chickpeas are at the heart of a hummus war over who owns the dish, as Lebanese and Israeli chefs kept outdoing each other for the record of the world's largest plate.

Which animal fills the blank: 'The largest animal known to have ever existed is the ____'?

Blue whales are the largest animals on record, yet they live almost entirely on krill, which they strain from huge gulps of seawater through baleen plates.

Which word fills the blank: 'A young kangaroo is called a ____'?

Joey births can be put on hold: a mother kangaroo can pause her next embryo's development until the joey already in her pouch moves out.

Which animal fills the blank: 'The fastest land animal is the ____'?

Cheetahs are built for sprinting rather than fighting, so lions and hyenas often bully them away from prey they have just caught.

Which country fills the blank: 'The flightless kiwi bird is native to ____'?

New Zealand's kiwi, DNA studies suggest, are closer kin to Madagascar's extinct elephant birds than to the moa that shared their islands.

Which animal fills the blank: 'The ____ has three hearts and blue blood'?

Octopus blood is blue because it carries oxygen with a copper-based protein, which works better than our iron-based haemoglobin in cold, oxygen-poor water.

Which gadget fills the blank: 'Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone as a phone, an internet communicator and a widescreen ____'?

iPod, phone and internet communicator all sat behind a screen Jobs had switched from plastic to glass after a prototype he carried in his pocket got scratched.

Which name fills the blank: 'The programming language ____ was created by Guido van Rossum'?

Python began as Guido van Rossum's hobby project for the week around Christmas 1989, and he took the name from the comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus.