Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

A discovery that changed medicine

Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin in 1928 came about almost by accident. Returning to his laboratory at St Mary's Hospital in London after a holiday, he noticed that a mould had contaminated one of his petri dishes and was killing the bacteria around it. It took more than a decade, and the work of other scientists such as Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, before penicillin became a usable drug in the 1940s.

The element hiding behind a Latin name

The chemical symbol Sn for tin makes little sense in English, but it comes from the Latin word stannum. Many element symbols follow the same pattern, borrowed from Latin or other older names rather than the modern English term - which is why gold is Au, from aurum, and lead is Pb, from plumbum. Tin itself has been used for thousands of years, most famously mixed with copper to make bronze.

A novel that rewrote the rules

James Joyce's Ulysses, published in 1922, retells Homer's Odyssey across a single day in Dublin. Its stream-of-consciousness style and dense wordplay made it famously difficult, and it was even the subject of a landmark obscenity case in the United States. Today it is widely regarded as one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century, and Dublin celebrates its events every year on 16 June, known as Bloomsday.

Why Australia's capital is not its largest city

Canberra became the capital of Australia as a compromise between Sydney and Melbourne, the country's two biggest cities, which both wanted the honour. The site was chosen inland, and the city was designed by the American architect Walter Burley Griffin. Parliament moved there in 1927, though the city's growth was slow at first.

Two continents, one mountain range

The Andes stretch along the western edge of South America, running through several countries including Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Argentina. They form the longest continental mountain range in the world, and their highest peak, Aconcagua, rises to nearly 7,000 metres in Argentina.