Weekly Quiz #33
A free weekly 20-question general knowledge quiz
Welcome to the 33rd 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
Last weekend, Dara won the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest with her song Bangaranga, giving which country their first ever win in the competition?
Published this month, Seek the Traitor’s Son is the first novel in a new dystopian romantasy series by which author, best known for her Divergent series trilogy (2011-2013)?
In the final week of the Scottish Premiership League, which team snatched their 14th top-flight title in 15 years with a 3-1 victory over Heart of Midlothian, preventing Hearts from winning their first championship title in 66 years?
Released this month, Dai Dai is the official anthem for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. It is performed by Nigerian singer Burna Boy and which singer, who also sang the official anthem for the 2010 World Cup?
Topping Netflix charts in 59 countries this week, which action thriller TV series sees Yahya Abdul-Mateen star as former Special Forces captain John Creasy, a role played in 2004 by Denzel Washington in a film of the same name?
Which 31-year-old golfer won the 2026 PGA Championship last week, becoming the first English winner since 1919, and the second man of Indian descent to win a major championship?
Known for films including Oldboy (2003) and No Other Choice (2025), which director is the first-ever Korean to serve as jury president at the Cannes Film Festival?
Mixed bag
Galvanisation is the process of applying a protective layer of which element to steel or iron to prevent rusting?
The city of Berlin is surrounded by which German state, which also gives its name to a prominent landmark in the city?
In a standard guitar tuning, the highest and lowest strings are both tuned to which note?
Linen is made from the bast fibres of which plant, with scientific name Linum usitatissimum?
Named for the Canadian educator who coined it, what management concept refers to the principle that “in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”?
The 2023 Vesuvius Challenge awarded prizes to teams that could successfully recover text from carbonised papyrus scrolls found at a villa in which Ancient Roman town around 16km from Pompeii, now a World Heritage Site?
Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956) and If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) are among the novels by which American writer and civil rights activist (1924-1987)?
What term refers to the combining or merging of various distinct beliefs or schools of thought, particularly in a religious context?
Pictures
Garden of the Hospital in Arles is one of two paintings made by which artist of the hospital in which he stayed in 1888 and 1889 with a condition diagnosed as “acute mania with generalised delirium”?
Making its West End debut last month, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is a musical based on the 2009 memoir co-written by William Kamkwamba, who as a 13-year-old, built a working wind turbine out of scraps to help save his village from famine in which African country?
This is an excerpt of the Florentine Codex, a 16th century ethnographic text by Spanish friar Bernadino de Sahagún that documents the culture, cosmology, society and history of the Aztec people. It is written in Spanish and which other language?
This is promotional artwork for which award-winning 2025 puzzle game, in which players explore a shifting, mysterious mansion to find the elusive 46th room to claim an inheritance?
Who is this British author, speaker, and advertising executive (b. 1965), known for his 2019 book Alchemy: The Magic of Original Thinking in a World of Mind-Numbing Conformity, in which he argues that great marketing ideas are often built around a core idea that is profoundly irrational?
And that’s this week’s quiz! I hope you enjoyed it.
Answers
Bulgaria. Dara’s song topped the jury votes and the televotes to comfortably win the competition, meaning next year’s Eurovision will be held in Sofia. Our own Delta Goodrem, maybe best known in the UK and Ireland for her role as Nina Tucker on Neighbours in the early 2000s, finished fourth with her song Eclipse. Bulgaria’s song Bangaranga takes its title from a Jamaican Patois word meaning “a joyful kind of disorder” and is partially inspired by the Bulgarian practice of kukeri, where elaborately costumed men perform traditional rituals to scare away evil spirits.
Veronica Roth. Roth’s new book Seek the Traitor’s Son follows Elegy Ahn, a soldier in a post-pandemic world who spends her days battling the rival faction known as the Talusar. It is the first book in her new Burning Empire series. Last month, Roth also announced that she would be returning to the world of her hit Divergent trilogy with two new books, the first of which, The Sixth Faction, will be published in October this year. Roth wrote Divergent while on winter break in her senior year at college, aged just 21.
Celtic FC. After being atop the table for 250 days, Heart of Midlothian needed a draw in their final match with Celtic to secure the title for the first time since 1960, and the first title not won by Celtic or Rangers since Aberdeen in 1985. They looked set to pull it off until two late Celtic goals broke Hearts’ hearts and gave Celtic their 14th top-flight championship in the last 15 years. Heart of Midlothian ultimately take their name and crest from the heart-shaped Heart of Midlothian mosaic on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, which inspired the title of Walter Scott’s 1817 novel The Heart of Mid-Lothian.
Shakira. The title of the song, Dai Dai, is an Italian expression meaning “come on, come on”. Shakira performs the song with Nigerian singer, songwriter and producer Burna Boy, the first African artist with two albums with over a billion streams on Spotify, and the first solo Nigerian artist to win a Grammy (in 2021). Shakira’s 2010 World Cup official anthem was the global hit Waka Waka (This Time for Africa), which remains in the top 20 most viewed YouTube videos of all time, with around 4.5 billion. It’s been a big week for Shakira, who was recently awarded a €55 million payout after being acquitted of tax fraud in her high-profile case with the Spanish government.
Man on Fire. Both the new series and the 2004 Tony Scott film, and an earlier 1987 adaptation starring Scott Glenn, are based on a 1980 novel by A.J. Quinnell (the pen name of English novelist Philip Nicholson). While the novel is originally set in Malta and Italy, the new series takes place in modern-day Rio de Janeiro (and the 2004 film was set in Mexico City).
Aaron Rai. Rai shot a final-round 65 (-5) to win by three strokes ahead of Jon Rahm and Alex Smalley, becoming the first English-born winner since Jim Barnes, who won the first two editions of the tournament in 1916 and 1919. Rai became the second man of Indian heritage to win a major after Fijian-born Vijay Singh, who won the PGA Championship twice (1998. 2004) and also the 2000 Masters.
Park Chan-wook. Park’s film Oldboy (2003) attained critical acclaim worldwide, winning the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2004 under then-jury president Quentin Tarantino, who lobbied for it to win the Palme d’Or at the same festival, though he was ultimately outvoted. 2025’s No Other Choice was nominated for three Golden Globes, including Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, and was selected as the South Korean entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the Academy Awards, but was not nominated.
Zinc. The zinc coating prevents corrosive substances from reaching the underlying steel or iron, thereby preventing rusting through exposure to the atmosphere. The process is named after Italian physician, physicist and biologist Luigi Galvani (1737-1798), who is also known for his experiments on bioelectricity, discovering that the muscles of dead frogs’ legs twitched when touched by an electric spark.
Brandenburg. The state gives its name to the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. The Berlin-Brandenburg metropolitan region comprises the city of Berlin and the entire state of Brandenburg, and is the third-largest metropolitan region in the country. Within that, there is a smaller region known as the Berliner Umland, which refers to Berlin and the Brandenburg municipalities immediately bordering it. Many people commute to Berlin from Brandenburg, and the suburban area surrounding the city is often referred to as the Speckgürtel (bacon belt), a generic term for the affluent suburban area surrounding a city. In 1996 a referendum was held concerning fusing the two states, but it did not pass.
E. The guitar’s standard tuning consists of the notes E, A, D, G, B, and E. The E of the first string and the E of the sixth string are two octaves apart.
Flax. There is evidence of humans using wild flax as a textile dating back 30,000 years, with spun, dyed, and knotted flax fibres found in Dzudzuana Cave in modern-day Georgia. Linen has also been found in remnants of a 10,000-year-old Swiss lake dwelling, and in the Qumran Caves near the Dead Sea Scrolls. Flax is also sometimes known as line from the Old English, which is the source of the alternative name linseed oil for the oil produced from the plant.
The Peter principle. Developed by Laurence Peter and explained in the 1969 book The Peter Principle, the principle states that a person who is competent in their job will ultimately earn a promotion to a position that requires different skills. If the person is incompetent at the new level, they will not be promoted again, and if they are competent at the new level, they will continue getting promoted until they reach a level at which they are incompetent. Thus everyone rises to a level of incompetence, and no further.
Herculaneum. Like Pompeii, Herculaneum was buried after the 79 AD eruption of Mt Vesuvius. A villa at the site, now known as the Villa of the Papyri, contained a library of more than 1,800 scrolls that were packed and ready to be moved to safety when the building was overtaken by pyroclastic flow from the eruption. The scrolls were carbonised and attempts to read them risked destroying the scrolls themselves, so in 2023 the Vesuvius Challenge was announced, which awarded a cash prize to teams who could extract text using 3D x-ray images supported by machine learning techniques. Text has now been read from multiple unopened scrolls, including the title of the work On Vices by Philodemus. It’s hoped the library might contain some works that have been considered lost. You love to see it.
James Baldwin. Baldwin was an influential public figure and orator, particularly during the civil rights movement. He famously debated conservative intellectual William F. Buckley in a televised debate that has since been regarded as one of the most influential debates on race relations in America. Baldwin’s novels often included gay and bisexual men, such as the protagonist of Giovanni’s Room, and Baldwin had relationships throughout his life with women and men.
Syncretism. In the Ancient world, Hellenistic religion showed syncretic features, blending in various places with Mesopotamian, Persian, Egyptian, and Etruscan-Roman elements. Some modern examples of syncretic religious systems include Haitian Vodou and the Brazilian African diasporic religion Candomblé, which combine elements of traditional religions of West and Central Africa and Catholicism.
Vincent van Gogh. In December 1888, Van Gogh’s mental health had been deteriorating, and following an argument with Paul Gauguin, he cut off part of his own left ear. He was hospitalised in Arles twice in as many months, returning home briefly in 1889, but ending up back in hospital, suffering from hallucinations and delusions that he was being poisoned. The courtyard of the former hospital is now a centre for Van Gogh’s works, called Espace Van Gogh.
Malawi. Kamkwamba grew up in a farming family in rural Malawi, and a famine forced him to drop out of school as his family could no longer afford the tuition. He frequented the local library and discovered his love of electronics. He went on to make a functioning wind turbine, and later, a solar-powered water pump that supplies the first drinking water in his village. Kamkwamba’s story was also adapted into a 2019 film, also called The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, starring Maxwell Simba and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Nahuatl. Nahuatl served as the lingua franca and administrative language of the Aztec civilisation. It is the source of the words avocado, chocolate, and tomato. In partnership with Nahua elders, Sahagún conducted research, compiled evidence and wrote and edited his findings, working on the project from 1545 until his death in 1590. The work contains 12 books totalling 2,500 pages, including more than 2,000 illustrations drawn by Aztec/Nahua artists, and has been described as “one of the most remarkable accounts of a non-Western culture ever composed.”
Blue Prince. A pun on the word “blueprints”, the game was solo developed over eight years by LA-based designer Tonda Ros. The player assumes the role of Simon P. Jones, who has inherited the Mt. Holly Estate mansion from his great uncle, with the stipulation that Simon must locate a hidden 46th room within the mansion in order to secure the inheritance. Failure to reach the room within a single day means Simon must start the search afresh the next day, with the complication that the house’s architecture gets rearranged overnight. In 2026, the game won multiple D.I.C.E. Awards and Game Developers Choice Awards.
Rory Sutherland. Sutherland is the vice chairman of the Ogilvy & Mather agency and is known for applying behavioural science to marketing, advertising and problem-solving. He co-founded the annual Nudgestock festival and writes a fortnightly column in The Spectator, titled Wiki Man, in which he explores his contrarian behavioural science-informed ideas.