Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

A discovery that turned a diagnosis into a manageable condition

Before the 1920s, a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes was effectively a death sentence, and doctors could do little beyond prescribing near-starvation diets. The breakthrough came in Canada, where Frederick Banting and Charles Best worked in a Toronto laboratory and succeeded in extracting insulin from the pancreas of dogs. Their first human patient received the treatment in 1922, and Banting shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine the following year. Insulin transformed diabetes from a fatal illness into a condition millions of people live with today.

The plumber who became a global icon

Mario first appeared in the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong, though he was then known simply as Jumpman and worked as a carpenter. The character got his own game, Super Mario Bros., in 1985, and it went on to sell tens of millions of copies and help revive the home console market. Since then he has starred in dozens of titles across generations of hardware, making him one of the most recognisable figures in entertainment. Few fictional characters have stayed relevant for so long.

A patch of ocean that never stopped feeding stories

The Bermuda Triangle is a region of the western Atlantic Ocean, roughly bounded by Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico. Its fame rests on a string of disappearances of ships and aircraft reported there during the twentieth century, some of them genuinely unexplained. However, researchers and writers have repeatedly pointed out that the area is heavily travelled, that its weather can turn violent quickly, and that many supposed incidents were exaggerated or happened elsewhere. The legend says more about our appetite for mystery than about the ocean itself.

Bolivia's lofty geography and its many faces

Bolivia sits in the heart of South America and is one of only two landlocked countries on the continent. It has two capitals: Sucre is the constitutional one, while La Paz serves as the seat of government and is the highest administrative capital in the world. Much of the country lies high in the Andes, and its population is predominantly Indigenous, with Aymara and Quechua cultures woven into daily life. Salar de Uyuni, the vast salt flat in the southwest, is among its best known natural wonders.