Q 01/05

On which island was Archimedes' home city, where he was born and killed?

A) Crete

B) Sicily

C) Rhodes

D) Samos

Answer · why

B) Sicily

The city was a self-governing Greek colony in Magna Graecia when he was born around 287 BC.

Q 02/05

What did Archimedes supposedly cry as he ran naked through the streets after his bathtub insight?

A) Hosanna!

B) Aha!

C) Alea iacta est!

D) Eureka!

Answer · why

D) Eureka!

The word means "I have found it!" and is now the state motto of California, referring to the 1848 gold discovery.

Q 03/05

Which king of Syracuse asked Archimedes to check whether his gold wreath was cut with silver?

A) Dionysius I

B) Gelon

C) Hiero II

D) Agathocles

Answer · why

C) Hiero II

According to Vitruvius the wreath displaced more water than pure gold and less than silver, proving the goldsmith a cheat.

Q 04/05

Which Roman writer, two centuries after Archimedes died, is the source of the bathtub story?

A) Plutarch

B) Vitruvius

C) Lucretius

D) Suetonius

Answer · why

B) Vitruvius

A rival 5th-century poem, Carmen de Ponderibus, has him use a balance dipped in water instead.

Q 05/05

Archimedes' principle states that a body immersed in water experiences an upthrust equal to what?

A) The weight of fluid it displaces

B) The volume of fluid it displaces

C) The pressure at its lowest point

D) Its own weight in air

Answer · why

A) The weight of fluid it displaces

It appears in his treatise On Floating Bodies, which survives in Greek only in the Palimpsest.