Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

A symbol that breaks the pattern

Most chemical symbols match their English names, but a handful come from Latin instead: iron is Fe (ferrum), gold is Au (aurum) and lead is Pb (plumbum). Fluorine's symbol, F, is one of the straightforward ones. The element itself is a pale yellow-green gas and the most reactive of all the elements, which is why it is never found free in nature.

Two very different American novels

Dick and Nicole Diver, the troubled couple at the heart of Tender Is the Night, were closely modelled on Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's own marriage. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the novel while living in Europe, and its Riviera setting reflects the expatriate world he knew well. The Great Gatsby, by contrast, is a much shorter book about longing and reinvention in 1920s New York.

The island with two names

Dominica's capital, Roseau, sits on the island's south-west coast and is one of the oldest towns in the Caribbean. The island should not be confused with the Dominican Republic, a much larger country on a different island. Dominica is volcanic and mountainous, which is why it is nicknamed the "Nature Island" and remains one of the region's least developed destinations.

A vaccine born from observation

Edward Jenner's 1796 experiment grew out of a local belief that milkmaids who had caught cowpox did not later fall ill with smallpox. He tested the idea by inoculating a young boy with material from a cowpox sore, then exposing him to smallpox. The boy remained healthy, and the practice of vaccination - named after the cow, vacca in Latin - gradually spread across Europe.