Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

A river that belongs to one country only

The Yangtze is often compared with other great rivers of the world, yet it has a distinction that sets it apart. Unlike the Nile, the Amazon or the Danube, which cross or border several nations, the Yangtze rises and ends entirely within China. It begins in the Tanggula Mountains on the Tibetan Plateau and travels roughly 6,300 kilometres before emptying into the East China Sea near Shanghai.

The capital that is not the best-known city

Many visitors assume Istanbul is Turkey's capital, and it is easy to see why: it is the country's largest city and its historic heart. Ankara, however, has held that role since 1923, when the new republic was founded. The choice was deliberate, placing the seat of government in the centre of Anatolia rather than on the Bosphorus.

A fanfare that became a space odyssey

Richard Strauss composed "Also sprach Zarathustra" in 1896, inspired by the philosophical novel by Friedrich Nietzsche. Its opening sunrise section, with its famous rising brass motif, later became inseparable from Stanley Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey". Strauss also wrote the opera "Der Rosenkavalier" and tone poems such as "Don Juan" and "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks".

A novel that grew from childhood memories

Harper Lee drew on her own upbringing in Monroeville, Alabama, when she wrote "To Kill a Mockingbird". Published in 1960, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year. The character of Atticus Finch, a small-town lawyer defending a Black man falsely accused, became one of American literature's most enduring moral figures.

The small country with no coastline

Luxembourg is one of Europe's landlocked states, bordered by Belgium, France and Germany. Despite its modest size, it is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg City. Its three official languages - Luxembourgish, French and German - reflect its position at the crossroads of Germanic and Romance Europe.