Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

The boy who made Mark Twain famous

Mark Twain published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, drawing heavily on his own childhood in the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri. The book follows Tom's mischief and adventures, including the famous fence-whitewashing scene. Twain later gave Tom's friend Huckleberry Finn his own novel, widely considered one of the great works of American literature.

A pastry with a French reputation and an Austrian past

The croissant is a staple of French bakeries, but its origins trace back to Austria, where a similar crescent-shaped pastry called the kipferl was already known. The version we recognise today took shape in France, where bakers refined the dough into the flaky, buttery form. So the croissant's story is less purely French than its reputation suggests.

How generations get their labels

The term Generation Y, often called millennials, refers to people born between 1982 and 1994. Generation Z follows, covering those born from the mid-1990s into the early 2010s, while Generation Alpha describes those born after that. These boundaries are not fixed, and different sources sometimes shift the exact years.

Elements named after scientists

Copernicium and mendelevium are both named after notable figures in science. Mendelevium honours Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist who created the periodic table of elements. Copernicium pays tribute to Nicolaus Copernicus, the astronomer who argued that the Earth orbits the Sun. Their symbols, Cn and Md, can easily be confused with more common elements like cobalt, copper or magnesium.