Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

The novelist who became a national monument

Victor Hugo was far more than the author of Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris. He was also a poet, a playwright and a politician, and his funeral in 1885 drew an enormous crowd to the streets of Paris. Notre-Dame de Paris, published in 1831, helped draw attention to the cathedral's crumbling state and is often credited with fuelling a movement to restore it.

A pencil born of wartime shortages

Nicolas-Jacques Conté developed his pencil in 1795, during a period when France was cut off from its usual supplies of graphite. His solution was to mix powdered graphite with clay and fire it in a kiln, a method that allowed the hardness of the lead to be adjusted and made pencils far cheaper to produce. The basic principle behind his process is still used in pencil manufacturing today.

The parrots of Brooklyn

Monk parrots, also known as monk parakeets, are native to temperate parts of South America, yet wild colonies have lived in New York City for decades. They are unusual among parrots in building large communal nests of twigs, which can be seen in parks and on utility poles. Their presence in the city has long puzzled ornithologists, and several explanations have been suggested for how they arrived.

The gas that gave us the word "inflammable"

Henry Cavendish isolated hydrogen in 1766 and recognised it as a distinct substance, though he did not name it. The gas is the lightest element in the universe and the most abundant, forming the bulk of stars like our Sun. Its name comes from Greek roots meaning "water-former", a nod to the fact that burning it produces water.

A mountain range where continents meet

The Caucasus Mountains sit at the boundary between Europe and Asia, with the Greater Caucasus range running between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia lie to the south of the range, a region known as the South Caucasus. It is one of the most linguistically diverse areas in the world, home to languages that belong to entirely separate families.