Q 01/05

Zhuang Zhou woke from a dream unsure whether he was a man or which creature now dreaming that it was him?

A) A butterfly

B) A carp

C) A sparrow

D) A tiger

Answer · why

A) A butterfly

A butterfly. Zhuangzi used the dream to ask whether waking life is any more real, and he is said to have lived as loosely: he turned down the king of ...

Q 02/05

Qin minister Zhao Gao tested which courtiers dared contradict him by calling what animal a horse in open court?

A) A camel

B) A deer

C) An ox

D) A donkey

Answer · why

B) A deer

A deer. Courtiers who called it a deer were later executed, and 'point at a deer and call it a horse' is still the Chinese idiom for a brazen lie nobo...

Q 03/05

After the First Emperor died on tour in 210 BC, his chancellor masked the smell of the corpse with carts of what?

A) Burning incense

B) Fresh flowers

C) Rotten fish

D) Live pigs

Answer · why

C) Rotten fish

Rotten fish was carted before and behind the emperor's wagon so the court would not learn he was dead before the succession was fixed. The secrecy let...

Q 04/05

In Zhang Heng's 132 AD earthquake detector, a bronze ball fell from a dragon's jaws into the mouth of which animal?

A) A tortoise

B) A crane

C) A lion

D) A toad

Answer · why

D) A toad

A toad sat under each of the eight dragon heads, and the one that caught the ball showed the quake's direction. The device once fired when nobody in t...

Q 05/05

The Records of the Grand Historian's entry for 240 BC is the earliest certain sighting of which comet?

A) Encke's

B) Halley's

C) Hale-Bopp

D) Swift-Tuttle

Answer · why

B) Halley's

Halley's Comet. Chroniclers went on recording its visits, yet nobody knew they were one comet until Edmond Halley matched three sightings in 1705 and ...