Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

A constellation that lent its name to a space programme

Gemini is Latin for "twins", and the constellation's two brightest stars, Castor and Pollux, are named after the inseparable brothers of Greek myth. Pollux is the brighter of the pair, and Castor is actually a complex system of several stars bound together. The name later travelled far beyond astronomy: NASA's Gemini programme, which ran in the mid-1960s, took its name from the constellation because each mission carried two astronauts.

A language with a long literary history

Hindi is the most widely spoken language in India, written in the Devanagari script and used across much of the north of the country. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family, which links it distantly to English, Spanish and Persian. India has no single national language, and Hindi shares official status at the federal level with English, while each state may adopt its own official language.

The body's hardest-working chemical factory

The liver sits in the upper right of the abdomen, largely protected by the rib cage. It is the largest internal organ and performs an astonishing range of jobs: storing energy as glycogen, producing bile for digestion, and breaking down toxins, alcohol among them. It also has a rare capacity among human organs - it can regenerate much of its own tissue after damage or surgery.

Why Venus outshines everything else in the sky

Venus is wrapped in thick clouds of sulphuric acid that reflect sunlight extremely efficiently, which is why it appears as the brilliant "morning star" or "evening star". Its brightness varies noticeably depending on its phase and its distance from Earth as the two planets orbit the Sun. Mercury also shows phases, but it stays close to the Sun in our sky and is far harder to spot.

A short novel that helped define a philosophy

Albert Camus published The Stranger in 1942, the same year as his essay The Myth of Sisyphus. The novel follows Meursault, a French Algerian who reacts to his mother's death with apparent indifference - a detachment that becomes central at his trial. Camus was born in Algeria and later won the Nobel Prize in Literature; he died in a car accident in 1960, at the age of 46.