Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

The game that conquered the world

Football, or soccer, earned its nickname "the beautiful game" largely through the artistry of players like Pele, whose flair and creativity turned matches into spectacles. The sport's global reach is unmatched: it is played and watched on every continent, and its biggest tournament, the FIFA World Cup, draws a television audience that dwarfs most other sporting events. That combination of simplicity and skill is exactly what the nickname celebrates.

Agatha Christie, queen of the whodunit

Agatha Christie wrote dozens of detective novels, and A Murder Is Announced is one of her Miss Marple mysteries, built around a newspaper notice that invites readers to witness a killing. Christie's plots helped define the golden age of detective fiction, with clues planted fairly and solutions revealed at the end. Her work has been translated into more languages than almost any other author's, and her stage play The Mousetrap has run in London's West End for decades.

Scurvy and the vitamin that stopped it

Scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin C, a fact that took centuries of long sea voyages to establish. Sailors on extended trips without fresh fruit or vegetables developed bleeding gums, weakness and slow-healing wounds. Once the link to citrus was understood, lemons and limes became standard shipboard supplies, which is one reason British sailors picked up the nickname "limeys".

Jupiter, the giant of the solar system

Jupiter is the largest planet orbiting the Sun, so massive that all the other planets could fit inside it with room to spare. Its most famous feature, the Great Red Spot, is a storm larger than Earth that has been observed for centuries. Despite its size, Jupiter is a gas giant with no solid surface to stand on.

Van Gogh's night scenes

Vincent van Gogh painted The Night Café in Arles, in the south of France, using intense contrasting colours to capture the atmosphere of a cafe that stayed open through the night. He wrote about the painting in letters to his brother Theo, explaining that he wanted to express the darker side of human life through colour rather than realism. The result is one of his most striking and unsettling interiors.