Vivid CHRISTMAS- NEW YEAR QUIZ
THE ANSWERS
February 2005
Hearty congratulations to Catalin Dica, who is the winner of Vivid’s Christmas-New Year Quiz. With a score of 46 out of a possible 64, Catalin walks away with an excellent mixed dozen bottles of Special Reserve Prahova Valley wines, made available by our friends at Halewood. The answers, the subject of much debate and conjecture are printed below, with the questions. Honourable mentions go to Ionut Staicescu, Robert Tullett, Gabriel Boldescu and Mihai Barculescu for their fine efforts too.
1. Who was the first Romanian to play in English football?
Stefan Iovan (Brighton and Hove Albion 1990-1991)
2. For how long was Pope John Paul I in office?
33 days, from 26th August 1978 to 28th September 1978
3. Which song was the Beatles first number one hit?
From Me To You
(released 2nd May 1963) rated number one on Record Retailer, a UK
trade magazine which was generally accepted as 'the' authoritative music industry
singles chart. Acceptable answers would include Please Please Me
and She Loves You, which were number one hits rated by other UK charts
4. Complete this sentence from King Lear:
''Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,
They kill us for their _____''.
The missing word is 'sport'
5. Who said, ''It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more
wonderful to miss it''?
Mark Twain
6. Which Christian denomination was forcibly assimilated by the Romanian Orthodox
Church in 1948, with the support of Romania’s communist government?
The Greco-Catholics (who use Orthodox rituals, but whose
spiritual leader is the Pope)
7. What animal product was used to make the first billiard balls?
Ivory
8. What replaced it?
The first thermoplastic, which was a mix of celluloid
and collodian, in 1876
9. With Adrian Mutu a memory, how many Romanian footballers now ply their
trade in the English leagues, and who are they?
Two: Cosmin Contra, for West Bromwich Albion, and Viorel
Ganea, for Wolverhampton Wanderers
10. The poet Mihai Eminescu died of
a) gunshot wounds sustained in a duel
b) syphilis contracted from a Viennese prostitute
c) tuberculosis
The correct answer is (b)
11. If you are a size 10 shoe in the UK, what size will you be in the US,
Europe, and Japan?
10 1/2, 44 2/3, and 285
12. Who said ''Money is never the problem, it’s always the solution''?
John D Rockefeller
13. Which company launched Romania’s largest corporate bond issue during
2004?
Raiffeisen Bank
14. Before clean-sweeping this year’s World Series 4-0, the Boston Red
Sox had not won baseball’s supreme prize since when?
1918
15. What is the official language of the Solomon Islands?
English
16. What was the Struma?
A ship commissioned to carry nearly 800 Jewish passengers
from Constanta to British-controlled Palestine in December 1941, which was
eventually sunk in the Bosporus Straits by a Russian submarine in February
1942, with one survivor
17. Which religious building project involving the demolition of a communist
monument caused controversy in Romania in 2004?
The Cathedral of the People, projected to be built in
Carol Park, on the site of the mausoleum of communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu
Dej and the graves of other prominent communists from the 1940s and 1950s
18. Which muscle group does a French press target?
The triceps
19. Who said, ''These are my principles, and if you don’t like them
… well, I have others''?
Groucho Marx
20. Who succeeded Umberto I, the king of Italy, when he was assassinated in
1900?
His son, Victor Emanuel III
21. In what year was Greenwich Mean Time adopted?
1911
22. Who was the youngest person ever to be made a Hero of the Socialist Party
of Romania?
Nadia Comaneci
23. When did Joseph Pilates conceptualise the exercise program that now bears
his name?
During the first world war, while he was in prison in
England
24. The Union Carbide disaster occurred in India in 1984. When did the company
finally settle claims for compensation?
(a) 1986 (b) 1992 (c) 2004
No answer is correct. Union Carbide is yet to settle
25. Which Romanian talk show host rose to prominence as the originator of
the Cenaclul Flacara youth events of the 1980s?
Adrian Paunescu
26. The viola has four strings tuned to what pitches?
C, G, D and A
27. Which German painter, sculptor and collagist, born in 1891, is considered
to have been the founder of the Dada movement?
Max Ernst
28. Which American President claimed that trees are bad for the environment?
(a) George W. Bush
(b) Bill Clinton
(c) Ronald Reagan
The correct answer is (c)
29. What was Romania’s largest privatisation deal during 2004?
SNP Petrom, acquired by OMV
30. Which company tried to patent a variety of wheat, claiming it had invented
it, when Greenpeace proved it had been in use for generations in India?
Monsanto
31. In winning the Australian election of 2004, John Howard recently became
the country's second longest-serving prime minister. Who is the first?
Robert Menzies, who was Australia's prime minister for
17 years at various times during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s
32. Which novels, originally published in English were voted the best, second
best and third best of the twentieth centuryin a survey of Random House editors
in 2000?
Ulysses, by James
Joyce, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
33. Which American abstract-expressionist painter known for 'action painting'
was killed in a car accident in 1956?
Jackson Pollock
34. Three American golfers have each played in a record eight Ryder Cup teams.
Who are they?
Billy Casper, Lanny Wadkins, and Raymond Floyd
35. How many animal experiments, to the nearest hundred thousand, took place
in the UK during 2003?
2.8 million (a 2.2 per cent increase on 2002)
36. What is the only Southeast Asian country never to have been taken over
by a European power?
Thailand
37. Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf has had a number of renowned narrators.
Name two of them.
There are too many to mention here but they include
Leonard Bernstein, David Bowie, Sean Connery, Dom DeLuise, Dame Edna Everage
(Barry Humphries), John Gielgud, Lenny Henry, Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee,
Jack Lemmon, Sophia Loren, Dudley Moore, Andre Previn, Sharon Stone and Peter
Ustinov
38. In winning this year's US PGA, Vijay Singh passed two important milestones.
What were they?
He became the world’s number one rated golfer,
a position that had been occupied by Tiger Woods for four years, and he became
the first player to win more than $10 million in prize money
39. Which material did the French sculptor Auguste Rodin mainly use for his
work?
Bronze
40. Who was the first footballer to win the European Cup with two different
teams?
Miodrag Belodedici (Steaua Bucharest 1986, Red Star
Belgrade 1991)
41. What early Hemingway novel describes the running of the bulls in Pamplona?
The Sun Also Rises (also known as Fiesta)
42. Who is the only Australian cricketer to score 1000 runs during an Ashes
Tour to England but not play in a Test match?
Matthew Hayden, in 1993
43. The holy man Zossima is the spiritual guide of which character in which
novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky?
Alexei (Alyosha) Karamazov, in The Brothers Karamazov
44. Which two journalists were credited for uncovering the Watergate scandal,
and for which publication did they work?
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who worked for the
Washington Post
45. What was described as ''the longest suicide note in history''?
The UK Labour Party’s 1983 election manifesto
46. What city did Nicu Ceausescu, the dictator’s son, have responsibility
for?
Sibiu
47. What notorious political leader did Ion Iliescu suggest might be pardoned
soon?
Miron Cozma
48. What notorious commodities trader, once one of the United States most
wanted men, received a presidential pardon from Bill Clinton in the last days
of his presidency?
Marc Rich
49. Which media mogul was recently subpoenaed by the US Securities and Exchange
Commission?
Conrad Black
50. The name of which head of state is also the Russian word for 'crow'.
President Voronin of Moldova
51. How many keys are there on a standard modern piano?
88
52. What colour is associated with the type of sensationalist journalism produced
at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries in the US?
Yellow
53. What is the name of the young Romanian TV talk-show host who awards
his guests a white ball for a correct answer, and a black one for the
wrong answer?
(a) Robert Turcescu
(b) Marius Tuca
(c ) Mihaela Radulescu
The correct answer is (a)
54. Richard Strauss wrote Metamorphosen (1945) for how many solo
string
instruments?
23
55. Which Moldovan wine is known locally as the 'Queen of England' because
Queen Elizabeth II regularly orders the 1990 vintage?
Negru de Purcari
56. After the US election this year, President Bush gave his wife Laura a
Scottish Terrier as a birthday present. What is its name?
Miss Beazley
57. The Bushes have another dog and a cat as pets in the White House. What
are their names?
Barney, another Scottish Terrier, and India
58. Who said, ''You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things
that make you want to live to a hundred''?
Woody Allen
59. What is the standard length of an Olympic swimming pool?
50 metres
60. What is the standard length of a cricket pitch?
22 yards
61. Which ruler of which Central American country was forcibly removed from
office in February 2004?
Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti
62. From which Romanian city do the Cheeky Girls hail?
Cluj
63. Which legendary Romanian journalist, writing between the first and second
world wars, is said to have built each floor of a palatial villa in Bucharest
with money he obtained through blackmail?
(a) Mircea Eliade
(b) Pamfil Seicaru
(c) Dumitru Tinu
The correct answer is (b)
64. What is the name of the Romanian who flew into outer space on 14th May
1981 as part of the crew of Soyuz 40?
Dumitru Prunariu
