Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

A borrowed name on the Texas prairie

Austin sits on the banks of the Colorado River, but it is not the same Colorado that carved the Grand Canyon. Texas has its own river of that name, and the city took its own name from Stephen F. Austin, an early Anglo-American settler who brought colonists into Mexican Texas in the 1820s. The capital moved around before settling there in 1839, when the site was still a frontier settlement known as Waterloo. The distinctive pink granite for the state capitol building was quarried nearby.

A book about burning books

Ray Bradbury wrote "Fahrenheit 451" in the early 1950s, working on a rented typewriter in the basement of a university library. The title refers to the temperature at which paper is said to ignite, and the novel imagines a future America where firemen set fires rather than put them out. Bradbury later said the book was less about government censorship than about television and mass media crowding out reading - a complaint that has aged in interesting ways.

The language of a crossroads country

Standard Arabic is the official language of Egypt, but the country's linguistic reality is far more layered. Egyptian Arabic, the everyday spoken variety, differs enough from the standard form that some linguists treat it as a separate language, and it is widely understood across the Arab world thanks to Egypt's film and music industries. Older layers remain too: Egyptian Arabic still carries Coptic vocabulary, and English and French persist in education and business.

A spirit that starts as a grain

Gin begins as a neutral spirit distilled from grain, then gets its character from juniper berries and whatever botanicals a distiller chooses. That grain base is what separates it from rum, which is made from sugarcane, and tequila, which comes from the blue agave plant. Gin's medicinal origins in the Netherlands and its later popularity in England gave the world both the gin and tonic and a notorious eighteenth-century drinking craze.

Italy's northern neighbours

Austria shares a border with Italy, running along the Alps through the Brenner Pass and beyond. That frontier has a complicated history: the region around Bolzano, known as South Tyrol, belonged to Austria-Hungary until it was transferred to Italy after the First World War, and German remains an official language there alongside Italian. Spain and Belgium, by contrast, lie nowhere near Italian territory.