Q 01/05

A Douglas-fir at the Oregon State Capitol in Salem grew from a seed that had traveled where in 1971?

A) The South Pole

B) The Moon

C) Mount Everest

D) The ocean floor

Answer · why

B) The Moon

The Moon is where the seed went, carried aboard Apollo 14 before it was ever planted. The young tree was moved to the Capitol grounds from Oregon Stat...

Q 02/05

Which winner of all five major Academy Awards was filmed inside Salem's Oregon State Hospital?

A) Close Encounters of the Third Kind

B) The Silence of the Lambs

C) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

D) It Happened One Night

Answer · why

C) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was shot on the wards in 1975, and the hospital's own superintendent, Dean Brooks, played a doctor on screen. Part of ...

Q 03/05

The name of Salem, Oregon, is an Anglicized form of a Hebrew word meaning what?

A) Harvest

B) Refuge

C) Promise

D) Peace

Answer · why

D) Peace

Peace is the meaning of shalom, the Hebrew word behind the name. The public square at City Hall is called Peace Plaza in recognition of the names the ...

Q 04/05

Oregon's capitol buildings in Salem were destroyed in both 1855 and 1935 by what kind of disaster?

A) Fire

B) Flood

C) Tornado

D) Mudslide

Answer · why

A) Fire

Fire took the first statehouse in 1855, and the 1935 blaze burned hot enough to destroy the second building's copper dome. The present Capitol opened ...

Q 05/05

The gold-leaf statue standing atop the Oregon State Capitol in Salem depicts what kind of figure?

A) A fur trapper

B) A gold miner

C) A pioneer

D) A cavalry scout

Answer · why

C) A pioneer

A pioneer holding an axe tops the dome, and locals know him as the Gold Man. Oregon schoolchildren paid for his 1984 re-gilding with a penny drive.