Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

When fiction warns us about the future

George Orwell's 1984, published in 1949, gave English a whole vocabulary for surveillance and manipulated language: Big Brother, doublethink, Newspeak. Orwell drew on his experience of wartime propaganda and of totalitarian regimes, but he set the novel in a Britain renamed Airstrip One, part of a superstate called Oceania. The book has never been out of print, and its terms resurface whenever governments debate data collection or censorship.

The collector's word hiding in plain sight

Numismatist comes from the Latin numisma, meaning coin, and it covers the study and collecting of coins, medals and paper money. The other options in that question belong to different worlds entirely: an ornithologist studies birds, while balneology is the study of bathing and mineral springs. English is full of these -ologist words, and each one quietly tells you what its owner spends their time on.

A short story that still unsettles readers

Guy de Maupassant published The Necklace in 1884, and it remains one of the most anthologised short stories in French literature. Its plot turns on a borrowed piece of jewellery, a lost evening and a twist that has been imitated ever since. Maupassant wrote hundreds of stories, many of them sharp, unsentimental portraits of ordinary people caught by money, vanity or bad luck.

Haydn in London, and a composer who travelled well

Joseph Haydn composed his twelve London Symphonies during two extended stays in the city in the 1790s, where he was celebrated by large public audiences rather than aristocratic patrons. The symphonies include nicknames such as "Surprise" and "Clock", often attached by others rather than by Haydn himself. His visits were a turning point in his career and influenced the young Beethoven, who briefly studied with him in Vienna.

Why Fiji's map is mostly blue

Fiji is made up of more than 300 islands, but only around 110 are inhabited, with the great majority of the population living on just two: Viti Levu and Vanua Levu. The rest range from small resort islands to uninhabited volcanic outcrops. The country's exclusive economic zone, by contrast, covers an enormous stretch of ocean, which is why fishing and maritime boundaries matter so much to its economy.