Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

The Caribbean capital that got there first

Santo Domingo, the answer to our first question, is not just the capital of the Dominican Republic. Founded at the end of the fifteenth century by Bartholomew Columbus, brother of Christopher Columbus, it is widely regarded as the oldest continuously inhabited European-established city in the Americas. Its colonial zone, with the first cathedral and first university of the New World, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. So the question hides a genuine piece of world history.

Denali and the naming battles

North America's highest peak, Denali, rises about 6,190 metres in Alaska. For much of the twentieth century it was officially called Mount McKinley, after a US president who never set foot in Alaska. In 2015 the US government restored the Koyukon Athabascan name Denali, meaning "the high one". The mountain is also famous for its extreme weather and for the fact that its apparent height, measured from base to summit, is greater than that of Everest.

Jules Verne: the novelist who thought like an engineer

Jules Verne, who wrote From the Earth to the Moon, was one of the first writers to make science itself the adventure. He researched astronomy and ballistics carefully, and his fictional launch site in Florida is often compared with the real Cape Canaveral, though the resemblance is partly coincidence. Verne's Voyages extraordinaires ran to dozens of novels and helped shape what we now call science fiction.

Mary Anderson and the rain problem

The windshield wiper was patented in 1903 by Mary Anderson, an American real estate developer and rancher from Alabama. She reportedly got the idea during a winter trip to New York, watching drivers struggle to see through sleet and rain. Her device was hand-operated from inside the car, and early critics thought it would distract drivers. Within a decade, though, mechanical wipers had become standard equipment.

A sea with no outlet

The Caspian Sea is the largest inland body of water on Earth, bordered by five countries, including Russia, Iran and Kazakhstan. It is called a sea because of its size and its salty water, but it has no connection to the ocean and sits in a deep basin between Europe and Asia. Its exact legal status, sea or lake, has been the subject of long diplomatic negotiations over oil and fishing rights.