Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

A capital squeezed between mountains and sea

Santiago sits in a valley at the foot of the Andes, roughly 100 kilometres from the Pacific coast. It is not Chile's seat of legislative power: the National Congress meets in Valparaíso, the port city that gave the quiz one of its wrong answers. That split is unusual among South American countries and often surprises visitors who assume the capital holds every branch of government.

The gentle giant of the shark world

The whale shark earns its name from its size, not its appetite for people. It is a filter feeder, straining plankton and small fish from the water, and it can grow longer than a city bus. Unlike the great white, it poses no real threat to swimmers - which is why divers in places like the Maldives and the Philippines travel specifically to swim alongside it.

A revolution that reshaped the twentieth century

The Russian Revolution of 1917 ended centuries of tsarist rule and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. It unfolded in two main stages: the February Revolution, which toppled Tsar Nicholas II, and the October Revolution, when the Bolsheviks seized power under Vladimir Lenin. Its consequences - from the Cold War to the space race - were felt for the rest of the century and beyond.

Grieg, Ibsen and the music of Peer Gynt

Edvard Grieg wrote his incidental music for Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt, which premiered in 1876. Two suites drawn from that score, including the pieces known as "Morning Mood" and "In the Hall of the Mountain King", became far more famous than the play itself. Grieg was Norwegian, and the folk-inflected colour of his writing helped shape a distinctly national voice in European music.

The stories behind two chemical symbols

Nitrogen's symbol, N, is straightforward, but holmium's Ho shows that not every symbol matches its English name's first letters. Holmium takes its name from Holmia, the Latin form of Stockholm, the city where it was first identified. It belongs to the lanthanide series and has niche uses in lasers and magnetic research rather than everyday life.