Q 01/05

Which food gives its name to an informal unit of radiation dose because of its radioactive potassium?

A) Avocado

B) Banana

C) Coconut

D) Orange

Answer · why

B) Banana

A banana's potassium-40 is harmless, yet a truckload of them can set off the radiation alarms that screen cargo at US ports.

Q 02/05

Which garment was named in 1946 after a Pacific atoll where the United States had just tested an atomic bomb?

A) Sarong

B) Jersey

C) Bikini

D) Capris

Answer · why

C) Bikini

The bikini went on show in Paris four days after the first peacetime nuclear test. Designer Louis Réard is said to have hoped for an equally explosive...

Q 03/05

Which Japanese movie monster is a prehistoric sea creature awakened and empowered by nuclear radiation?

A) Godzilla

B) Mothra

C) Gigan

D) Ghidorah

Answer · why

A) Godzilla

Godzilla was conceived as a metaphor for nuclear weapons, months after fallout from an American hydrogen bomb test contaminated a Japanese tuna boat a...

Q 04/05

From the 1920s until about the 1970s, which retailers installed X-ray machines for customers to use while shopping?

A) Jewelry stores

B) Drugstores

C) Toy stores

D) Shoe stores

Answer · why

D) Shoe stores

Shoe stores bought an estimated 10,000 of the fluoroscopes in the US alone, and by 1970 the machines were banned in 33 states.

Q 05/05

Golfer Eben Byers died after drinking some 1,400 bottles of Radithor, a patent medicine containing which element?

A) Thorium

B) Uranium

C) Radium

D) Polonium

Answer · why

C) Radium

Radium built up in Byers's bones, and his death in 1932 was put down to radium poisoning. The same element poisoned the factory women who painted glow...