Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

The string player's quiet trick

Pizzicato comes from the Italian word for "pinched", and it describes plucking a string with the fingers instead of drawing a bow across it. Violins, violas, cellos and double basses can all play this way, which is why the technique turns up everywhere from light orchestral passages to jazz. In orchestral scores, composers often use pizzicato to create a sudden change of colour or a playful, almost percussive effect.

Reading numbers the Roman way

Roman numerals still appear on clock faces, in film credits and in the names of monarchs and popes. The system works by adding values from left to right, with a smaller numeral placed before a larger one indicating subtraction, as in IV for four. The largest numeral in this quiz, MDXXX, adds up to 1,530, while CLII gives 152 and MCL gives 1,150. It is a compact system, though long numbers quickly become unwieldy.

Landlocked in the heart of Europe

Czechia sits in Central Europe with no coastline at all, bordered by Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Austria. Being landlocked has shaped its history: without ports, the country has long depended on river trade and overland routes, and Prague became a major crossroads for commerce and culture. Belgium and Spain, by contrast, both have coastlines on the North Sea and the Mediterranean respectively.

Where Europe ends and Asia begins

The Ural Mountains run roughly north to south through Russia and are traditionally treated as part of the boundary between Europe and Asia. The range is not especially high, but it is long, stretching over 2,000 kilometres from the Arctic coast towards the steppes. Geographers also cite the Ural River and the Caspian Sea when describing the divide, which has always been as much a cultural convention as a physical fact.