Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

The Bennet family and the pressure of inheritance

The characters in Pride and Prejudice are shaped by a very specific legal problem. Because Mr. Bennet has no son, his estate is entailed away from his daughters, meaning it must pass to a male heir. That is why the unappealing Mr. Collins appears in the story: he is the cousin who stands to inherit Longbourn. This financial pressure explains Mrs. Bennet’s urgency about marriage and gives the novel much of its social tension, beyond the famous romance between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy.

Oxygen and the problem of simultaneous discovery

Joseph Priestley is often credited with discovering oxygen in the 1770s, but the story is more complicated. Carl Wilhelm Scheele had produced the gas earlier, though his work was published later. Antoine Lavoisier then gave oxygen its name and explained its role in combustion. Priestley, however, continued to defend the older phlogiston theory, meaning the man who isolated the gas did not fully understand what he had found. The discovery is a classic example of science advancing through overlapping, sometimes competing, contributions.

Los Angeles and the commercial turn of the Olympics

The 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles marked a turning point in how the Games were financed. After the financial problems of Montreal in 1976, few cities wanted to host. Los Angeles ran the event with existing venues, heavy corporate sponsorship and television deals. The result was a commercially successful Games, and the model influenced how later Olympic hosts approached budgeting. It also became politically notable for the Soviet-led boycott, a response to the American boycott of Moscow four years earlier.