Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

A puzzle that travelled the world

Tetris was created in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, a programmer working in Moscow, and it reached Nintendo's Game Boy in 1989 - the same year the handheld console launched. Its seven falling shapes, each made of four squares, are known as tetrominoes, and the game's name combines "tetra" (four) with "tennis", Pajitnov's favourite sport. Few puzzle games have been ported to so many platforms.

The river that drains a continent

The Amazon carries more water than any other river on Earth, and its basin covers a vast share of South America. It rises in the Andes and flows generally eastward across Brazil before emptying into the Atlantic. The Orinoco, further north, runs mostly through Venezuela, while the Paraná drains south-central South America.

Afrikaans: a language with several homes

Afrikaans is one of South Africa's official languages and is also spoken widely in Namibia, where it serves as a lingua franca. It developed from Dutch settler speech and has absorbed words from Malay, Portuguese and various African languages. Its name literally means "African".

Kafka's famous transformation

Franz Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis opens with travelling salesman Gregor Samsa waking to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. Published in 1915, it is one of the most discussed works of twentieth-century literature, though Kafka asked for much of his writing to be destroyed after his death.

Twelve stars, many meanings

The European Union flag shows a circle of twelve gold stars on a blue field. The number twelve was chosen as a symbol of completeness and unity rather than to match the number of member states, which has changed many times since the flag was adopted by the Council of Europe in 1955.