Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

A short war with a long afterlife

The Falklands War of 1982 lasted just over two months, pitting Argentina against Britain over the remote South Atlantic islands. Argentina calls them the Islas Malvinas, and the dispute over sovereignty long predates the fighting. The conflict ended with British control restored, but the question of who rightfully owns the islands has never been fully settled.

The album that changed the music business

Michael Jackson's Thriller, released in 1982, became the best-selling album in history and reshaped what a pop record could look like. Its songs were accompanied by elaborate short films, most famously the mini-movie for the title track. That fusion of music and cinematic video helped push MTV and the record industry into a new era.

Numbers with a pattern hiding in plain sight

The sequence 1, 8, 27, 64 is built from cubes: 1x1x1, 2x2x2, 3x3x3 and 4x4x4. The next term is therefore 5x5x5, or 125. Cube numbers grow deceptively fast, which is why the jump from 64 to 125 feels larger than the earlier steps.

Why chlorine is Cl, not Ch

Chemical symbols often come from Latin or Greek roots rather than modern English names. Chlorine takes its symbol from the element's name, but the two-letter form Cl follows the convention of capitalising the first letter and lowercasing the second. That rule keeps symbols unambiguous across the periodic table.

The dwarfs who never made the cut

The Seven Dwarfs in Disney's Snow White have names that read like a list of character traits: Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy and Dopey. "Prof" is not among them, though early drafts of the story experimented with other names before the final seven were fixed.