Q 01/05

R was created in the early 1990s to teach statistics at a university in which Southern Hemisphere country?

A) Australia

B) New Zealand

C) South Africa

D) Argentina

Answer · why

B) New Zealand

New Zealand is where R began: two University of Auckland statisticians wanted a language for their introductory classes. They first posted it online i...

Q 02/05

The R package that popularised the %>% pipe puns on the name of which surrealist painter of a famous pipe?

A) René Magritte

B) Salvador Dalí

C) Max Ernst

D) Joan Miró

Answer · why

A) René Magritte

René Magritte painted The Treachery of Images, a pipe captioned "Ceci n'est pas une pipe". The package is called magrittr, and its official descriptio...

Q 03/05

R releases carry codenames such as "Great Pumpkin" and "Masked Marvel", all nods to which comic strip?

A) Garfield

B) Dilbert

C) Peanuts

D) Doonesbury

Answer · why

C) Peanuts

Peanuts has supplied every R codename since Great Pumpkin, the first of them, which was released on Halloween 2011.

Q 04/05

A classic built-in R dataset records fuel economy for 32 cars from a 1974 issue of which magazine?

A) Car and Driver

B) Road & Track

C) Popular Mechanics

D) Motor Trend

Answer · why

D) Motor Trend

Motor Trend is the "mt" in mtcars. Each car is listed with eleven measurements, including miles per gallon, horsepower, weight and quarter-mile time.

Q 05/05

R is one of three programming languages honoured in the name of which notebook project?

A) Zeppelin

B) Observable

C) Jupyter

D) Colab

Answer · why

C) Jupyter

Jupyter blends Julia, Python and R into one name. It also nods to Galileo, whose notebooks recorded his discovery of Jupiter's moons.