Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

A capital that almost wasn't called Georgetown

Georgetown sits at the mouth of the Demerara River on the Atlantic coast and is Guyana's largest city as well as its capital. The settlement changed hands repeatedly between the Dutch, French and British before the British took lasting control, and it was renamed Georgetown in honour of King George III. Guyana itself became independent in 1966 and is the only South American country with English as its official language.

The river that drew a border

The Columbia River rises in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia before crossing into the United States, where it flows through Washington and forms much of the boundary between Washington and Oregon. It is one of the largest rivers in North America by volume, and its huge drainage basin supports extensive hydroelectric dams. Lewis and Clark followed the Columbia on the final stretch of their famous expedition to the Pacific in 1805.

Montmartre: a hill with an artistic past

Montmartre is a hill in the north of Paris, crowned by the white domes of the Sacre-Coeur basilica. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries it was a cheap, bohemian district where artists including Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec and Modigliani lived and worked. Its cafes and studios made it a centre of modern art before rising rents pushed many painters towards Montparnasse.

Gold: soft, heavy and unreactive

In its pure form gold is a soft, dense and highly malleable metal, which is why it is rarely used alone in jewellery and is usually alloyed with copper, silver or other metals to harden it. A single gram can be beaten into a sheet roughly a square metre in size. Its resistance to corrosion and tarnish is one reason it has been valued as a store of wealth for thousands of years.