Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

A word for every branch of the living world

Botany takes its name from the Greek word for pasture or fodder, a reminder that the field began with practical questions about what animals and people could eat. Geology, by contrast, comes from the Greek for earth, and microbiology from the Greek for small life. The suffix -logy, meaning "the study of", runs through all of them, which is why the three options sound so similar even though they describe completely different sciences.

The lending library as a civic experiment

Benjamin Franklin and his friends founded the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731, a subscription library that let members pool their money to buy books none of them could afford alone. It grew into one of the great research libraries of the United States. Franklin later helped establish the first public lending library in America, in Philadelphia, and his belief that knowledge should circulate rather than sit on private shelves shaped how later libraries were run.

A cat breed with a tailless surprise

The Cymric is a long-haired relative of the Manx, the tailless cat from the Isle of Man. Cymric simply means "Welsh", though the breed did not originate in Wales. Cymrics can be completely tailless, have a short stump, or carry a partial tail, and the same gene that shortens the tail can occasionally affect the spine, which is why responsible breeders take the trait seriously.

Austria, Italy and a border drawn through mountains

Italy's northern edge runs through the Alps, and Austria is one of the countries on the other side of that ridge. The two share a border of roughly 430 kilometres, shaped largely by mountain passes that have served as trade and travel routes for centuries. Spain and Belgium, the other options, sit far from Italy and share no frontier with it.

The ocean that surrounds a continent

The Southern Ocean rings Antarctica and is usually defined as the waters south of roughly 60 degrees south latitude. It is the fourth-largest ocean and the only one that encircles a continent rather than being bounded by several. Its currents connect the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, which is why some older maps simply treated it as the southern reaches of those three.