Q 01/05

Crows gather in a murder and geese in a gaggle, but a group of rats is known as a what?

A) A scurry

B) A mischief

C) A clowder

D) A business

Answer · why

B) A mischief

A mischief is the usual collective noun for rats, although colony and horde are heard too. A scurry belongs to squirrels, a clowder to cats and a busi...

Q 02/05

Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp found that rats give ultrasonic chirps, likened to laughter, when they are what?

A) Groomed

B) Startled

C) Tickled

D) Cornered

Answer · why

C) Tickled

Tickled rats let out 50-kHz chirps, far too high for human ears, and they make the same calls during rough-and-tumble play.

Q 03/05

Magawa, an African giant pouched rat awarded a PDSA Gold Medal in 2020, was trained to sniff out what?

A) Truffles

B) Narcotics

C) Gas leaks

D) Landmines

Answer · why

D) Landmines

Landmines were Magawa's specialty: in five years in Cambodia he found 71 of them, and he was too light to set one off.

Q 04/05

Which pizza-and-arcade chain got a rat mascot when Nolan Bushnell bought what he thought was a coyote costume?

A) Chuck E. Cheese

B) Godfather's Pizza

C) Dave & Buster's

D) Round Table Pizza

Answer · why

A) Chuck E. Cheese

Chuck E. Cheese opened in San Jose in 1977, a passion project of Atari founder Bushnell, and its rat was redrawn as a guitar-playing mouse in 2012.

Q 05/05

Which reflex are rats physically unable to perform, one reason that poison baits work so well against them?

A) Vomiting

B) Sneezing

C) Yawning

D) Blinking

Answer · why

A) Vomiting

Vomiting is impossible for rats and other rodents, so a swallowed poison stays down. Many rat poisons even include an emetic, which protects other ani...