Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

The element at the bottom of the table

Livermorium, symbol Lv, is one of the synthetic superheavy elements, first created in 2000 through collisions of calcium and curium nuclei in a laboratory. It is named after Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which collaborated on the discovery. Like its neighbours near the bottom of the periodic table, it exists only briefly before decaying, which is why you will never encounter it outside a particle accelerator.

The invention that changed city skylines

Elisha Otis did not invent the elevator itself, but in 1852 he designed a safety brake that stopped the car from falling if the hoisting rope failed. He demonstrated it dramatically at the 1854 New York World's Fair by cutting the rope while standing on a raised platform. With the fear of falling cars removed, tall buildings became practical, and the modern skyscraper was born.

A goddess born of sea foam

Sandro Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus", painted in the mid-1480s, shows the goddess arriving on a shell, blown ashore by the winds. It is one of the earliest large-scale depictions of a classical mythological subject on canvas in the Renaissance. The painting now hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

A single day in London

Virginia Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway" follows Clarissa Dalloway through one June day in post-First World War London as she prepares to host a party. The novel moves between characters and between past and present, a technique Woolf developed in parallel with contemporaries such as James Joyce. It remains one of the clearest examples of modernist fiction's interest in inner life.

Capitals at the edge of the map

Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, sits at roughly 41 degrees south, making it the southernmost capital among the three options here. Bhutan's capital, Thimphu, lies in the Himalayas at around 2,300 metres above sea level, one of the highest capitals in the world. Tehran, by contrast, sits further north, on the slopes of the Alborz mountains.