Q 01/05

Which Jane Austen novel features Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy?

A) Mansfield Park

B) Emma

C) Sense and Sensibility

D) Pride and Prejudice

Answer · why

D) Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice earned Jane Austen just £110: she sold the copyright outright to the publisher Thomas Egerton, so the profits of its success went ...

Q 02/05

In Shakespeare's Hamlet, which character is Polonius's daughter and loves the prince?

A) Gertrude

B) Ophelia

C) Desdemona

D) Cordelia

Answer · why

B) Ophelia

Ophelia goes mad after Hamlet kills her father, Polonius; the queen reports that a willow branch broke under her and her soaked clothes dragged her do...

Q 03/05

Which 1932 dystopian novel imagines citizens bred in hatcheries and conditioned into fixed social castes?

A) Nineteen Eighty-Four

B) Fahrenheit 451

C) Brave New World

D) Animal Farm

Answer · why

C) Brave New World

Brave New World takes its title from The Tempest, where the sheltered Miranda cries 'O brave new world' at her first sight of strangers; Huxley's outs...

Q 04/05

Who wrote 'The Aeneid,' the epic of Aeneas's journey after the fall of Troy?

A) Virgil

B) Ovid

C) Dante

D) Homer

Answer · why

A) Virgil

Virgil died in 19 BC with the Aeneid still unrevised and is said to have asked for it to be burned; Emperor Augustus ordered it published instead.

Q 05/05

Which Russian author wrote 'Crime and Punishment', about Rodion Raskolnikov?

A) Fyodor Dostoevsky

B) Anton Chekhov

C) Leo Tolstoy

D) Ivan Turgenev

Answer · why

A) Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment deep in debt, having taken on his dead brother's creditors and family, and had to beg an editor for an ad...