Weekly Quiz #31
A free weekly 20-question general knowledge quiz
Welcome to the 31st weekly quiz!
As always, we’re aiming for interesting questions that could come up in future quizzes across a range of difficulties and topic areas: new stuff, traditional quiz areas, “I should know this but I don’t” questions. Enjoy.
Questions
In the news
The Saudi Public Investment Fund announced last week that it would end its funding of which professional golf league at the end of 2026?
With a self-titled album released in April, Nine Inch Noize is a collaborative musical project comprising which singer-songwriter, his frequent collaborator Atticus Ross, his wife Mariqueen Maandig, and German-Iraqi producer Boys Noize?
Released in March, the Nintendo Switch 2 game Pokémon Pokopia sees players control which Pokémon, known for its ability to mimic other objects and creatures?
Which Australian actor and co-creator of the comedy series Colin From Accounts appears in The Devil Wears Prada 2 as the “unproblematic heartthrob” love interest of Anne Hathaway’s character Andy?
The 2026 World Snooker Championship, which concluded this week, saw which 22-year-old become the second-youngest winner in history and the second consecutive champion from China?
Known for leading the commercial effort to sequence the first full human genome in the 1990s alongside the publicly-funded Human Genome Project, which genomics pioneer and author of A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life (2007) died last week, aged 79?
This week, the International Court of Justice will hold a week of hearings between Venezuela and Guyana over the ownership of which resource-rich disputed border region?
Mixed bag
In the pH scale used to specify the acidity or alkalinity of a substance, the letter H refers to which chemical element?
The capital city of which African country is semantically equivalent in French to the English name of the capital of Sierra Leone?
The Modern Prometheus is the subtitle of which 1818 novel, which began as a tale written in the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva?
While first commercially produced in Hawaii and now primarily in South Africa, the nuts of the genus Macadamia are indigenous to which country?
What linguistic term, from the Greek for “shape” or “form”, refers to the smallest indivisible unit of meaning within a word?
A 1980 album by AC/DC and a 2006 album by Amy Winehouse share two words in common from their three-word titles. Name either album, both of which are among the highest-selling of all time.
Which Dutch city was the site of the 1992 treaty that led to the creation of the European Union and the euro?
Which American writer, whose books include River of Shadows (2004), Hope in the Dark (2004) and A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), wrote the 2008 essay Men Explain Things to Me?
Pictures
The tallest rock relief in Europe at 55m, the rock sculpture of King Decebalus, the last king of Dacia who ruled from AD 87-106, is located on the the Danube River in which country, near the border with Serbia?
In March this year, Belgium unveiled the away jersey that their team will wear at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The tagline on the collar reads, “Ceci n’est pas un maillot” (“This is not a jersey”), a tribute to which Belgian surrealist artist?
This is an image of which American actress (b. 1998), who stars in the second season of the anthology series Beef? She portrayed Priscilla Presley in the 2023 biopic Priscilla and also appeared in Civil War (2024) and Wake Up Dead Man (2025).
This is the flag of which overseas collectivity of France?
This is an image of which arboreal mammal of the Procyonidae family native to Central and South America, sometimes also known as the “honey bear”?
And that’s this week’s quiz! I hope you enjoyed it.
Answers
LIV Golf. The breakaway golf tour and rival to the PGA was founded in 2021 and financed by the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. Its name refers to the Roman numeral 54, which is the number of holes that was played at LIV events (three rounds of 18), though in 2026, the league moved to a 72-hold format to align with other recognised formats.
Trent Reznor. Reznor is the founder, lead singer and primary songwriter of the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails. He and Ross have collaborated on many film scores, winning Academy Awards for The Social Network (2010), and Soul (2020) with co-composer Jon Batiste. Producer Boys Noize has also collaborated with many other artists, including A$AP Rocky and Frank Ocean, and he is one part of the duo Dog Blood with Skrillex. He co-wrote the 2020 Grammy-winning song Rain on Me, sung by Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande.
Ditto (known in Japan as Metamon). The game sees players in a post-apocalyptic version of the Kanto region, abandoned by humans and uninhabitable to Pokémon, where players control a Ditto who imitates a human to help restore the world and cultivate an environment that is habitable again.
Patrick Brammall. Brammall and his wife Harriet Dyer created, wrote, and star together in the Australian comedy series Colin From Accounts (2022-present). He plays apartment renovator and Anne Hathaway’s love interest Peter in The Devil Wears Prada 2, which also sees Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci, and Emily Blunt reprise their roles from the first film.
Wu Yize. Wu became the second Snooker World Champion from Asia after his compatriot Zhao Xintong won last year, and the second-youngest winner in history after Stephen Hendry, who first won in 1990 at the age of 21. Wu, who had never won a match at the Crucible before this year, defeated 2005 champion Shaun Murphy in the final.
Craig Venter. Venter revolutionised microbiology in 1995 when he and his team sequenced the genome of the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae, the first entire genome to be sequenced. He famously criticised the publicly-funded Human Genome Project as slow, wasteful and costly, and co-founded the private company Celera Genomics to win the race to decode the human genome. In a 2000 ceremony at the White House, President Clinton declared a tie between the competing projects.
Essequibo. The dispute concerns the Essequibo region, a 159,500 km2 area west of the Essequibo River, which has been disputed for more than a century. It is de facto controlled by Guyana, but also claimed by Venezuela, and the dispute has been more active since the discovery of oil and gas off the coast from 2015 onwards.
Hydrogen. The concept of pH was introduced in 1909 by Danish chemist Søren Peter Lauritz Sørensen. He did not precisely explain why he used the letter p, and its exact original meaning is still disputed, but the H clearly refers to hydrogen. The pH scale is is a logarithmic scale that measures the acidity or alkalinity of a solution based on the concentration of hydrogen ions (H+), with a greater concentration indicating a lower pH and a more acidic solution.
Gabon. The capital of Gabon is Libreville, which literally means “Free Town” in French, mirroring the name of Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone. While the area has been inhabited by the Mpongwe people since much earlier, Libreville was established in the 1940s by 52 free slaves from the Brazilian slave ship L’Elizia.
Frankenstein. In the summer of 1816, known as the Year Without a Summer thanks to the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley visited Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati, and the group amused themselves reading German ghost stories, with each proposing they write their own. Mary Shelley’s expanded into the novel Frankenstein.
Australia. The four species of trees, two of which produce the commercially important macadamia nut, are native to north-eastern New South Wales and Queensland. In the 1880s, seeds were introduced to Hawaii, which remained the world’s largest producer for more than 100 years.
Morpheme. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a language. It can be a whole word, or part of a word. For example, cats consists of two morphemes: cat (a particular animal) and -s (indication of the plural). Unbreakable consists of three morphemes: un- (signifying negation), break (the root verb), and -able, (the suffix meaning “capable of”).
Back in Black or Back to Black. AC/DC’s 1980 album Back in Black is listed as the second-highest selling album of all time on most lists, with reported sales of 50 million copies. Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black is the second-highest selling album of the 21st century in the UK, behind Adele’s 21, with reported sales of 20 million copies worldwide.
Maastricht. The Treaty of Maastricht, officially the Treaty on European Union, is the foundation treaty of the EU, and was signed by the 12 member states of the European Communities at the time, resolving to “continue the process of creating an ever closer union among the people of Europe”.
Rebecca Solnit. Solnit is the author of 17 books. Her essay Men Explain Things to Me, later also the title of a 2014 essay collection, is considered the work that “launched the term mansplaining”, despite Solnit not using the word in her original essay and later rejecting the term as gendered and sexist, writing in another essay, “You don’t fight patronizing by patronizing in return.”
Romania. Despite looking ancient (or perhaps something out of The Lord of the Rings), the relief was commissioned by Romanian businessman Iosif Constantin Drăgan and carved by 12 sculptors between 1994-2004. It depicts Decebalus, the last king of the region of Dacia, which included present-day Romania and Moldova, as well as parts of neighbouring countries. Decebalus fought against Roman emperors Domitian and Trajan, and is often considered a national hero in Romania.
Rene Magritte. The line on the jersey is a reference to one of Magritte’s best known works, the 1929 painting The Treachery of Images (La Trahison des images), which contains the line “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe):
Cailee Spaeny. For her role as Priscilla Presley, Spaeny was awarded the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 2023 Venice International Film Festival. She also starred in the 2024 film Alien: Romulus. She stars alongside Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan and Charles Melton in the second season of Beef, which premiered last month.
French Polynesia. French Polynesia is divided into five island groups: the Austral Islands, Gambier Islands, Marquesas Islands, Society Islands, and Windward Islands. Its capital is Papeete, located on Tahiti, which is part of the Society Islands. The flag was adopted in 1984, and depicts the coat of arms, which consists of an outrigger with a stylised emblem of the sun and sea.
Kinkajou. The kinkajou is the only member of the genus Potos, and is rarely seen in the wild because it is nocturnal, giving rise to its other alternative names, night ape and night walker. They are sometimes kept as exotic pets, perhaps most famously by Paris Hilton, whose pet kinkajou Baby Luv bit her in 2006, prompting her to seek hospital treatment.
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