Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

A capital named after a river

Conakry, the answer to the Guinea question, sits on a peninsula jutting into the Atlantic Ocean and takes its name from the Conakry River. It is both the country's capital and its largest city, and it grew from a small settlement into a major port during the colonial era. Freetown, one of the wrong options, is actually the capital of neighbouring Sierra Leone - an easy mix-up for anyone navigating West African geography.

The many faces of Middle-earth

J.R.R. Tolkien did not just write The Lord of the Rings; he spent decades building the languages, myths and histories of Middle-earth before the story was ever published. The Hobbit came first, in 1937, as a children's book, and its success led publishers to ask for a sequel. That sequel grew into a vast trilogy, and Tolkien's invented languages, such as Elvish, remain among the most detailed fictional tongues ever created.

From page to screen in 1999

The Matrix arrived in cinemas in 1999 and turned Keanu Reeves into the face of a sci-fi phenomenon. Its mix of "bullet time" visual effects, cyberpunk style and philosophical questions about reality made it a landmark of late-1990s cinema. Interestingly, Reeves had already worked with the film's directors, the Wachowskis, on a different project before being cast as Neo.

Newton and the apple story

Isaac Newton is the name behind the gravity question, and the famous falling apple is more than a myth - Newton himself described watching an apple fall as a prompt for his thinking about gravity. His law of universal gravitation, published in the 1680s, explained why objects fall and why planets orbit the Sun with the same underlying principle. It remained the standard description of gravity until Einstein's theories reshaped the picture in the twentieth century.