Glamorous sculptures, champion cheeses and the secret of Uranus – take the Thursday quiz

Fifteen questions on general knowledge and topical trivia plus a few jokes every Thursday – how will you fare?

Thursday again so soon. Ahead of you 15 questions on topical trivia, general knowledge, and slightly random things that the quizmaster remembers from the 1990s. Or was it the 1980s? Anyway, you know the drill by now: there’s Kate Bush and Ron from Sparks and bonus points in the comments for any hidden Doctor Who references you can spot – there are at least three this week. There are no prizes, it is just for fun. Let us know how you get on the comments.

The Thursday quiz, No 46

1. BOWLER OF THE CENTURY: The Thursday quiz wishes to start by paying tribute to one of the greatest cricketers of all time, Shane Warne. His family have accepted the offer of a state funeral from which Australian state, where he was born?

   1. Queensland

   2. New South Wales

   3. Victoria

   4. Tasmania

2. SO FILL UP YOUR GLASSES AND JOIN IN THE SONG: We also lost the lovely Lynda Baron this week. She was in three separate Doctor Who stories between 1966 and 2011 – but what was the name of the character she played in the children’s show Come Outside between 1993 and 1997?

   1. Auntie Mabel

   2. Aunt Sally

   3. Aunt Flo

   4. Nurse Gladys Emmanuel

3. FUNNY FACE: That’s a 1981 Sparks song where they “looked a lot like a Vogue magazine”, but that’s not important right now. Which British TV comedy show is launching its own worldwide streaming platform?

   1. Taskmaster

   2. Mrs Brown’s Boys

   3. Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway

   4. Hi-de-Hi!

4. SWEET BABY CHEESES: The World Championship Cheese Contest takes place each year in Wisconsin – famed for its cheeses, I guess. Anyway, which type of Swiss cheese has won it for the second consecutive time?

   1. Emmentaler

   2. Gruyère

   3. Raclette

   4. Wensleydale

5. HAPPY BIRTHDAY: It is the wonderful Neneh Cherry’s birthday today. Happy birthday, Neneh! What was her hugely successful and brilliant debut album called?

   1. Raw Like Sushi

   2. Manchild

   3. Homebrew

   4. Kisses on the Wind

6. ON THIS DAY: It is also the quizmaster’s mum’s birthday today. Happy birthday mum! She’s 75 you know! But it is also the anniversary of the first successful telephone test by Alexander Graham Bell. What was the first thing he said?

   1. “Mr Watson, confirm please!”

   2. “Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you!”

   3. “Ahoy-hoy, Mr Watson!”

   4. “Mr Watson, I’ve just founded a European Super League!”

7. ALSO ON THIS DAY BUT IN SPACE: In 1977 astronomers announced the discovery of rings around Uranus. I know. I know. How many rings around Uranus do astronomers currently say there are?

   1. 17

   2. 13

   3. 11

   4. 7

8. GCSE SCIENCE CORNER: Mosquitos can pass malarial parasites to humans. The little scumbags. What name is given to an organism that transmits a disease?

   1. Vector

   2. Antigen

   3. Symbiote

   4. Zygon

9. LITERATURE: Which of Iris Murdoch’s books won the Booker Prize in 1978?

   1. The Sea, the Sea

   2. Rites of Passage

   3. Under the Net

   4. The Time of Angels

10. SCULPTURE OF A GODDESS Swindon boasts a sculpture trail that includes works by Hideo Furuta and Jon Buck. But which glamorous movie and TV star from the town is celebrated with a statue outside a multiplex cinema at Shaw Ridge leisure park? It isn’t the statue in the picture by the way.

    1. Barbara Windsor

    2. June Whitfield

    3. Diana Dors

    4. Hattie Jacques

11. WELL, THIS IS AWKWARD: The National Portrait Gallery has acquired its first painted self-portrait by a black female artist, Everlyn Nicodemus’s Självporträtt, Åkersberga. How long, since the collection was first founded, has it taken for that to happen?

    1. 166 years – the collection was founded in 1856

    2. 126 years - the collection was founded in 1896

    3. 106 years – the collection was founded in 1916

    4. 86 years – the collection was founded in 1936

12. PLUMBER, BUT: 10 March is celebrated by some people as Mario day, as if you look at the date Mar 10 and squint really hard it sort of looks like it spells Mario. It is no “May the fourth be with you”, that’s for sure. But what was the early 1980s Nintendo game where Mario was unusually cast as the villain?

    1. Donkey Kong

    2. Donkey Kong Derby

    3. Donkey Kong's Revenge

    4. Donkey Kong Jr

13. ALLONS-Y: The website Wikivoyage lists 23 locations visited by the fictional Phileas Fogg in Jules Vernes’ novel Around the World in 80 Days. No 6 is Aden, Yemen. But what is the name of the ancient construction used to channel rainwater into drinking water for the city?

    1. The Wadi Ham Dam

    2. The Narva Reservoir

    3. The Tanks of Khemed

    4. The Cisterns of Tawila

14. FIBONACCI NUMBERS: First described in Indian mathematics, and forming a sequence where each number is the sum of the two preceding ones, F₃ is two. But which of these statements is true about the number two?

    1. It is the smallest prime number

    2. It is the only even prime number

    3. It is one of only two prime numbers that are consecutive to each other

    4. All three of the above are true

15. MUSIC: Which of these acts had a hugely successful album with It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back?

    1. Wu-Tang Clan

    2. OutKast

    3. Public Enemy

    4. Kate Bush

Solutions

1:C - Warne was born in Upper Ferntree Gully, Victoria in 1969. Warne took 708 wickets, the second most of all time, in 145 Tests across an astonishing 15-year international career, and while he was sometimes a controverisal figure, he was undoubtedly one of the greatest cricketers the quiz master has ever seen , 2:A - Auntie Mabel and her dog Pippin used to fly around the country having adventures is a small spotty light aircraft, usually educationally finding out how things were made along the way, and Lynda Baron filled it with absolute joy., 3:A - Taskmaster Supermax+ offers every episode of Taskmaster ever made after they noticed increasing viewing figures on YouTube from the US, a country the show has resolutely failed to succeed in so far. You can tell by his face that Ron from Sparks thinks you should have known that, 4:B - The cheese from Bern, Switzerland, made its maker, Michael Spycher of Mountain Dairy Fritzenhaus, a three-time winner. Spycher also won in 2020 and 2008. The cheese, called Gourmino Le Gruyère AOP, earned a score of 98.423 out of 100 which seems like a very precise and pedantic measurement for a cheese, 5:A - Her 1989 debut album spawned the hits Buffalo Stance, Manchild and Kisses on the Wind., 6:B - There is an incredibly complex story behind the invention of the telephone, with lots of conflicting patents and arguments about who invented what and when. But this is generally accepted to be what Alexander Graham Bell said to his assistant Thomas Augustus Watson on 10 March 1876 in a clear bi-directional conversation. Watson’s own notes record the message as “Mr Watson. Come here. I want you”, which is also possibly the first recorded instance of sexting, 7:B - According to Nasa, there are 13 known rings around Uranus. The inner rings are narrow and dark and the outer rings are brightly coloured. Nine were discovered in 1977, with further rings around Uranus emerging at a later date. William Herschel claimed to have observed the rings around Uranus in 1789, but modern astronomers are not sure how, because they are so faint that with his equipment he shouldn’t have been able to observe rings around Uranus at all, 8:A - The mosquito is a vector of transmission for the malarial parasites. I say again, the little scumbags, 9:A - It was her 19th novel. In it, the main character Charles Arrowby encounters his first love Mary Hartley Fitch after some distance of time, and events escalate., 10:C - It is a larger-than-life statue of Diana Dors, once described on this very website by Germaine Greer as “an exaggerated version of the blonde bombshell in her heyday, bursting out of the regulation decollete evening gown, nipples akimbo”. Blimey, 11:A - The collection was founded with £2,000 from parliament with the approval of Queen Victoria in 1856. For the first 40 years, the gallery was housed in various locations in London. It moved to its present location in 1896., 12:D - It was Donkey Kong Jr, where you acted as Donkey Kong’s offspring and tried to free your marauding giant ape father from Mario’s clutches after the usually lovable character had trapped the big lump in a giant cage, 13:D - The Wadi Ham Dam is in United Arab Emirates, the Narva Reservoir is on the border of Russia and Estonia, Khemed is a fictional location in the Tintin books. The Cisterns of Tawila sit above Aden and collect rainwater. Their construction origins are uncertain, and what exists today is mostly the result of colonial reconstruction by the occupying British during the Victorian era, 14:D - It has been a subject of some debate over the years as to whether one is a prime number, but general consensus is that it is not, which makes two the first number that is divisible by one and divisible by itself, ie divisible by only two separate integers. Therefore two is the first and smallest prime number, and two and three are the only consecutive primes. I don’t make the rules, 15:C - It was their second album, released in 1988, and featured Bring the Noise, Don’t Believe the Hype and Night of the Living Baseheads, among its blistering selection of tracks

Scores

1. 0 and above.

   We hope you had fun – let us know how you got on in the comments!

2. 3 and above.

   We hope you had fun – let us know how you got on in the comments!

• If you do think there has been an egregious error in one of the questions or answers, please feel free to email martin.belam@theguardian.com but remember, the quizmaster’s word is always final, and he is probably too busy covering the Winter Paralympics at the moment to read his email anyway.