Q 01/05

Emma Lazarus's sonnet The New Colossus, named after the wonder at Rhodes, was cast on a plaque for which monument?

A) Washington Monument

B) Statue of Liberty

C) Lincoln Memorial

D) Mount Rushmore

Answer · why

B) Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty received the poem on a bronze tablet fixed inside its pedestal in 1903. Lazarus wrote it in 1883 to help raise money for that pe...

Q 02/05

Which food was boiled into a soup and added to the mortar holding the Great Wall of China's bricks together?

A) Sticky rice

B) Soybean curd

C) Millet porridge

D) Wheat flour

Answer · why

A) Sticky rice

Sticky rice soup, stirred into slaked lime, made the mortar that holds the wall's bricks together. The grisly legend that workers' bones were mixed in...

Q 03/05

Which film hero finds the Holy Grail inside a temple whose entrance is really the Treasury at Petra?

A) Lara Croft

B) Allan Quatermain

C) Indiana Jones

D) Rick O'Connell

Answer · why

C) Indiana Jones

Indiana Jones reaches the Treasury in the climax of the 1989 film The Last Crusade. Only the facade is real: the temple's interior was filmed at a stu...

Q 04/05

Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro had a finger damaged in January 2014 when the statue was hit by what?

A) A helicopter

B) Hailstones

C) A hang glider

D) Lightning

Answer · why

D) Lightning

Lightning had also hit the statue in a 2008 storm, damaging its fingers, head and eyebrows. Rods in the head and arms are there to carry such strikes ...

Q 05/05

Ancient writers say the Colosseum in Rome was flooded early in its history to stage which kind of spectacle?

A) Mock sea battles

B) Hippopotamus hunts

C) Swimming races

D) Rowing races

Answer · why

A) Mock sea battles

Mock sea battles, known as naumachiae, are recorded for the arena's first years. They ended once Domitian had underground chambers built beneath the f...