Q 01/05

What does the word 'Inuit' mean?

A) The hunters

B) The northerners

C) The ice dwellers

D) The people

Answer · why

D) The people

The people: one person is an Inuk and two are Inuuk, so a phrase like 'the Inuit people' quietly says 'people' twice.

Q 02/05

Nanuq, familiar to English speakers as Nanook, is the Inuit word for which animal?

A) Polar bear

B) Arctic fox

C) Walrus

D) Snowy owl

Answer · why

A) Polar bear

Polar bear: in Inuit tradition Nanuq was also the master of bears, the spirit who decided whether a hunter deserved success in finding and killing one...

Q 03/05

Inuit descend from which culture that spread east from Alaska across Arctic Canada to Greenland?

A) Dorset

B) Norton

C) Clovis

D) Thule

Answer · why

D) Thule

Thule is a borrowed name: archaeologists took it from a trading post in north-west Greenland near their first finds, and the post had taken it from th...

Q 04/05

Inuit legends remember the Tuniit, who lived in the Arctic before them, as what?

A) Fierce sea raiders

B) Clever tricksters

C) Shy giants

D) Wandering spirits

Answer · why

C) Shy giants

Shy giants, in the usual telling: taller and stronger than Inuit yet easily put to flight. Many archaeologists identify them with the Dorset culture, ...

Q 05/05

Inuit oral history helped searchers in 2014 find a sunken ship from which lost Arctic expedition?

A) Henry Hudson's

B) John Franklin's

C) Vitus Bering's

D) Ernest Shackleton's

Answer · why

B) John Franklin's

John Franklin's: HMS Erebus lay in the bay where Inuit accounts said one abandoned ship had drifted, and HMS Terror turned up two years later. Canada ...