Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

The peninsula that shaped two empires

Spain shares the Iberian Peninsula with Portugal, and the two countries have influenced each other for centuries. Their border, running roughly 1,200 kilometres from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, is one of the oldest and most stable in Europe. Both nations also speak languages that spread across the globe during the age of exploration, which is why Spanish and Portuguese are among the most widely spoken languages in the world today.

Mozart's last great opera

The Magic Flute premiered in Vienna in 1791, the year Mozart died. He composed it while also finishing his Requiem, an astonishing burst of productivity at the end of his short life. The opera blends fairy-tale fantasy with Enlightenment ideals, and its Queen of the Night aria remains one of the most demanding pieces in the soprano repertoire.

Verne's journeys that never happened

Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days was published in 1872, at a time when railways and steamships were making global travel faster than ever before. Verne never actually travelled around the world himself. Instead, he relied on timetables, maps and his imagination - and readers were captivated by the idea that a strict schedule could turn the planet into a puzzle.

The mountains where continents meet

The Caucasus range sits at the boundary between Europe and Asia, spanning several countries. Its highest peak, Mount Elbrus, is the tallest mountain in Europe. The region is famous for its extraordinary linguistic diversity: dozens of languages, many unrelated to one another, are spoken within a relatively small area.

A telescope pointed at a new world

William Herschel spotted Uranus in 1781 while observing the night sky from his garden in England. He initially thought it was a comet, but further calculations showed it was a planet - the first discovered with a telescope. Herschel went on to build some of the largest telescopes of his era and later identified infrared radiation.