Old fakes, third place and very strange particles – take the Thursday quiz

We got bored and had a spring clean at the Thursday quiz as it fast approaches its second glorious year, so you may find some of the regular features slightly rearranged. The premise is the same – 15 questions that are either general knowledge or vaguely topical from the news, with some jokes and sarcasm mixed in. Your task is to get as many of them right as possible, then brag about it in the comments. There is a bonus point if you can spot a hidden Doctor Who reference in one of the wrong answer options – but there are no prizes, it is just for fun.

The Thursday quiz, No 51

1. OOH LA LA: The second round runoff in the French presidential election will be between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. But who came third in the first round on Sunday, narrowly missing out?

   1. Éric Zemmour

   2. Valérie Pécresse

   3. Jean-Luc Mélenchon

   4. Yannick Jadot

2. ARTS AND CRAFTS: The shortlist for the Turner prize was revealed this week, and one of the names on it produced the whipped cream sculpture that was on the fourth plinth in London's Trafalgar Square. Which artist?

   1. Ingrid Pollard

   2. Sin Wai Kin

   3. Veronica Ryan

   4. Heather Phillipson

3. SLIGHTLY MORE ADVANCED THAN GCSE SCIENCE CORNER: After a decade of meticulous measurements, scientists have announced that a fundamental particle has a significantly greater mass than theorised, shaking the foundations of our understanding of how the universe works. Which particle?

   1. Higgs boson

   2. W boson

   3. Z boson

   4. Quarks

4. JOHN REITH WILL BE FUMING: After many years, the BBC has finally admitted that it faked elements of what?

   1. The 1924 duet between a cello and a nightingale

   2. The 1932 radio address by King George V used to inaugurate the start of BBC Empire Service

   3. The 1967 live round-the-world satellite link-up of television that featured the Beatles performing All You Need Is Love

   4. The 1989 Doctor Who ratings in order to vindictively cancel the show just as it was getting really good again

5. HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Speaking of Doctor Who, it was Peter Davison's birthday yesterday. Happy birthday, Peter! But which year was his first full story as Doctor Who transmitted in the UK?

   1. 1980

   2. 1982

   3. 1983

   4. 1985

6. LEFT OUT IN THE COLD: That is a 2020 Sparks song about a designer at Uniqlo researching their next winter collection in Winnipeg. But that's not important right now. The two-time US national figure skating champion Alysa Liu has announced her retirement. How old is she?

   1. 16

   2. 18

   3. 21

   4. 23

7. SECRETS OF THE STARS: In 1930 the International Astronomical Union published its official boundaries for the constellations that cover the night sky. How many official IAU constellations are there in total?

   1. 44

   2. 66

   3. 88

   4. 122

8. ENSEMBLE CASTS: Art Fleming, Alex Trebek and Mayim Bialik have all presented which US game show?

   1. Jeopardy!

   2. Wheel of Fortune

   3. The Price is Right

   4. Name That Tune

9. SCOTTISH THINGS: Rattray Head lighthouse, Buchan Ness lighthouse and South Breakwater lighthouse are all located near which Scottish port and harbour?

   1. Lerwick

   2. Leith

   3. Inverness

   4. Peterhead

10. CITIES IN DISGUISE: Which European city has been known during its history as Serdica, Sredets and Triaditsa?

    1. Sarajevo

    2. Sofia

    3. Zagreb

    4. Split

11. ROAD SIGNS AROUND THE WORLD: This road sign from parts of Australia means what?

    1. New traffic lights ahead

    2. Part-time traffic lights ahead

    3. Pedestrian signals ahead

    4. Caution – planes flying in formation

12. WHY THE LONG FACE?: What was the name of the famous grey horse (not pictured) that won the King George VI Chase four times between 1986 and 1990?

    1. Desert Orchid

    2. Desert Rose

    3. Desert Violet

    4. Dobbin

13. AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS: The Wikivoyage website lists 23 locations visited by the fictional character Phileas Fogg in the Jules Verne novel, none of which he travelled to via a hot air balloon. No 11 is Hong Kong. But which of these river systems does the city lie nearest to?

    1. Yellow River

    2. Yangtze River

    3. Pearl River

    4. Three Parallel Rivers

14. FIBONACCI NUMBERS: First described in Indian mathematics, and forming a sequence where each number is the sum of the two preceding ones, F₈ is 21. Everybody knows that the legal age for purchasing alcohol in the US is (mostly) 21. But which of these countries also sets that limit at 21?

    1. Egypt

    2. Paraguay

    3. Japan

    4. Thailand

15. MUSIC: Latin teachers are being encouraged to use the translated lyrics of which pop star to encourage pupils to enthusiastically learn a language nobody has spoken in earnest for centuries?

    1. Katy Perry

    2. Taylor Swift

    3. Billie Eilish

    4. Kate Bush

Solutions

1:C - Mélenchon and his La France Insoumise party finished third with 21.95% of the vote, about 1% and 420,000 votes short of second place, 2:D - Phillipson was nominated for her solo exhibition Rupture No 1: blowtorching the bitten peach at Tate Britain and her Trafalgar Square fourth plinth commission, The End. That fourth plinth is just being held open for the inevitable public outcry that there should be a statue of Queen Elizabeth II on it in due course, isn't it?, 3:B - Ashutosh Kotwal, a physicist at Duke University who led the study, said the result had taken more than 400 scientists over 10 years to record and scrutinise a dataset of about 450tn collisions. They found it was different to the standard model’s prediction by seven standard deviations, which in layperson's terms is about 100 ancient Sumerian cubits or 'a lot', 4:A - Cellist Beatrice Harrison performed an extraordinary duet with a singing nightingale that was repeated for years and had millions of listeners, but we now know it was the musical equivalent of that joke about the bloke going out at 8pm every night to hoot at the owls and the owl always responds to him. 'That's funny,' says his neighbour, 'my husband does that at 8pm every night too.' Experts now believe the bird impressionist Madame Saberon was trilling the nightingale parts in 1924, 5:B - Castrovalva was broadcast in four twice-weekly parts on BBC One from 4 to 12 January 1982. He had briefly appeared as the Doctor at the end of Logopolis, which was broadcast in 1981. Davison recently turned up at a sci-fi convention holding a sign saying: 'He's not that special' and stood with it next to the massive queue for autographs and pictures with his son-in-law and fellow Doctor Who David Tennant, 6:A - Liu began skating at the age of five and said on Instagram: 'I feel so satisfied with how my skating career has gone … I’m finally done with my goals in skating, I’m going to be moving on with my life', having won more national figure skating championships than most people will participate in. You can tell by his face that Ron from Sparks thinks you should have known that, 7:C - They settled on 88, which between them cover the entire sky, meaning any single star can be identified as being in the area of a specific constellation, a bit like the shipping forecast areas for the sea. The 88 modern constellations depict 42 animals, 29 inanimate objects and 17 humans or mythological characters. None of them are Ron from Sparks, 8:A - Jeopardy! started in 1964, meaning it isn't quite as old as Doctor Who, 9:D - They are all near Peterhead on the east coast of Scotland. Buchan Ness and South Breakwater were built by Robert Stevenson in 1827 and 1833 respectively, 10:B - Sofia seems to have emerged during the 14th century as the name, after the Saint Sofia church, although institutions continued to use the name Sredets for a long time afterwards, 11:C - It is a warning about pedestrian signals in a very fetching lime green. Australia actually uses a wider and funkier colour palette for road signs than many countries, with orange and a sort of pink-mauve among the options available to designers, 12:A - Known as Dessie, he was voted the fifth best National Hunt horse of all time at one point. He died in 2006, aged 27, and his ashes were buried near a statue dedicated to him at Kempton Park racecourse, 13:C - Hong Kong sits at the delta where the Pearl River system empties out into the South China Sea. The Three Parallel Rivers is an inland system where the Yangtze, Lancang and Nujiang rivers run close together. The Yellow River empties into the Bohai Sea, and the Yangtze River empties into the East China Sea, 14:A - It is Egypt. The other three options all set the legal limit for purchasing alcohol at age 20, which presumably limits the appeal of the Thursday Quiz in those countries, as surely you can only enjoy it the way it was written – drunk?, 15:B - It is Taylor Swift, for some reason. A new guide to learning the language produced by a Cambridge University academic with too much time on their hands suggests the chorus of Bad Blood can be rendered as 'Quod, care, nunc malum sanguinem habemus'. But why?

Scores

1. 0 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 you wouldn’t want him to post you a box of live wasps.