Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

A country with more than one name

Kemet, the answer to our first question, means "the black land" in ancient Egyptian, a reference to the dark, fertile soil along the Nile. The name Egypt itself comes to us through Greek, while Egyptians today call their country Misr. Ancient Egypt also had a second common name, Deshret, "the red land", for the surrounding desert.

A machine born from a printing press

Christopher Latham Sholes, a printer and newspaper editor from Wisconsin, developed the first practical typewriter in 1868 with Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule. The design later evolved into the Remington No. 1, and the QWERTY keyboard layout Sholes helped devise is still with us today. Samuel Morse, one of the wrong answers, gave us the telegraph code instead.

A language that circled the globe

Portuguese is the official language of Angola, a legacy of centuries of Portuguese rule in southern Africa. It is also the official language of Brazil, Mozambique, Cape Verde and Portugal itself, making it one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. Angola has several national languages too, including Umbundu and Kimbundu.

The heaviest animal that has ever lived

The blue whale, the largest cetacean, can reach around 30 metres in length and weigh as much as 150 tonnes or more. Its heart alone is roughly the size of a small car, and its call can travel enormous distances underwater. Fin whales and sperm whales are large too, but neither comes close to the blue.

Goya's witness to history

Francisco Goya painted The Third of May 1808 to commemorate the execution of Spanish resistance fighters by Napoleon's troops. Goya lived through the events he depicted, and the painting is often cited as a forerunner of modern war art, with its stark light and unflinching focus on the victims. Diego Velázquez and El Greco, the other options, belonged to earlier generations of Spanish painting.